Mad Jack, Madder Rose
by Punctuator
Summary: A followup to “Lux.” A bit of backstory for our favorite dangerous field-manager and not-so-favorite villainess. Featuring a guest star from "Batman Begins," first-person narration, and at least one major life decision. Not seeing double...? You will.
1. Chapter 1

**MAD JACK, MADDER ROSE**

* * *

**Chapter 1**

Two days' patience. That's all it takes. I've found a place in Miami that suits my northern predilections. That is to say, by local standards, the condo is practically armor-plated. My contact in the company, the one with real-estate connections, said they were all month vacuuming the residual coke out of it after a half dozen chunks of the former owner- the few bits that the alligators left- were found in a local canal. But Bobby tends to exaggerate. In reality, the place smacks of imported money. Some old rich guy who wanted to soak up some sun before he kicked off. Whoever he was, punk-level druglord or ex-airline pilot or former CEO, whatever, he had the sense to install storm windows and a storm door. That's all I wanted: not to blow away the first time the windspeed climbs above eighty m.p.h.

It has a nice view, too, from the second floor. Western aspect, high sweeping sky, a wide swath of deep blue ocean. Beautiful. To me, open water always seems the stuff of possibilities. The view is rendered even better with Lisa blocking part of it. The boxes with the books beat the boxes with the lamps, still stuck in traffic somewhere in a delivery truck, and she's sorting while she unpacks, reading spines in the late-afternoon light from the balcony. I haven't brought the whole library down from Chicago. Just enough to make me feel grounded. Like she does.

She's all lean curves and legs, ash-gray t-shirt and jeans, her hair pulled back in a ponytail and a little more red than brown in the late-afternoon sunlight. She's examining the books with a mix of amusement and dead-serious concentration. Smiling to herself just enough to awaken her dimples. Armed with a pair of screwdrivers, flathead and Phillips, she's assembled, on her own, three bookshelves, while I tackled the hardware for the computer desk, the dresser, the second half of the entertainment center. What I had for furniture in Chicago pretty much stayed in Chicago; I wanted fresh stuff here. We took the bed for a test-drive last night. Before that, the sofa. _Notorious_ on the forty-inch TV.

It's the tail end of Saturday afternoon. Three nights ago, Wednesday, I stayed at her place. Last-minute mixups. The security guys from the company couldn't make it in to finalize the setup in the condo until Friday. Which was okay. It gave me a chance to get the pressing.

She doesn't wear much jewelry. Necklaces she usually won't bother with, though the ones I've seen are uncomplicated and tasteful; her earrings, she likes to say, all seem to end up as single twins. She has maybe a half-dozen rings, that I've seen. Class rings, high school and college; a couple in silver or white gold. Pretty simple. I made a wax pressing of the simplest one on Thursday morning. Six-fifteen a.m. Right before she got up to get ready for work.

She woke, as usual, right before the alarm rang. I was already back under the comforter beside her. The pressing-case was in the front right-hand pocket of my jeans, folded over the chair across from the bed. She showered. _We_ showered. She had time for toast and coffee, and then she was off to the Lux. I was off to meet with the security guys at the condo. That afternoon, I took the wax pressing to a jeweler's.

Let's call it ring seven. Size seven, too. Nothing predestined about it. Nothing starry-eyed or lucky. No guesswork, either: the jeweler sized it from the little circular moat in the wax. Like rings one through six, it's nothing fancy. A small, good-quality diamond, a dark, brilliant sapphire to complement it. I took it to her apartment Thursday afternoon while she was still at the Lux. One word on the square: _Someday?_

All day Friday, while the company's security team was still crawling around the new place with cordless drills and spools of wire, she didn't say a word about either the ring or the note. Twenty minutes ago, on top of the computer desk, edged under a reader's copy of _The Saint in Miami,_ I found the same square of paper I had left for her on Thursday. On the flipside, away from _Someday?,_ was written

_Yes_

She said she's afraid to wear it here. The ring. Just for now, with all the boxes and the sheeting and plastic bags and other packaging getting swept up and mashed together and taken out for the recyclers. Just for now, she has it hanging on a piece of white cotton twine around her neck, under her gray t-shirt.

Above her heart.

Two days' patience. That's all it took. Two days to go from _Someday_ to _Yes_. I now know the travel-time to heaven. I've just spent six hours bolting and screwing hardware into for-now furniture, and it's been the best six hours of my life.

#####

#####

What would the post card say?

_Dearest Mum,_

_Greetings from the Broward Correctional Institution. Wish you were here._

_Love always,_

_Rose_

I am here, ostensibly, in a two-woman cell in one of the higher-security housing units of the good ship Broward, deep in the sticky bowels of the swamp known as Florida, because I tried to blow up the Lux Atlantic, Lisa Reisert's precious hotel. In so doing, I tried to blow up the eponymous Miss Reisert. By extension, as they seem to be figuratively as well as nauseatingly actually attached at the hip, I attempted to vaporize Lisa's precious Jackson Rippner, as well as, in the bargain, give or take, approximately five hundred insignificant others. But that's hardly worth mentioning. In reality I am here because the company has yet to decide my fate. Never mind the tectonically slow workings of the underfunded, overly stuffed meat grinder that is the United States legal system: when John and Claire Carter determine what is to be done with me, their will will very much be done.

Never mind, either, that, technically, I am no longer in the company's employ. Like the parties to any decent bad relationship, we'll never be truly over one another.

At three p.m., they come for me. Two of them, late thirties, beefy and male, in deep blue uniforms, black bulletproof vests. A truncheon raps the bars near my feet. I'm lying on the lower of two bunks, reading an old paperback copy of _Enderby, _which I found two days ago, with surprise bordering on shock, in the prison library.

"Come on, Wheeler."

I know enough not to ask what they want, let alone try a touch of humor ("But, Jim, 'Rosemary' is so much prettier."): they're quick with the submission holds, nearly as quick with the pepper spray, and with a healing broken arm I'm in no shape to give them the mutilation they so deeply deserve. I mark my place and get up. On the bunk above mine, pale-faced Morris keeps her dark eyes in their dusk-gray bags locked on the cell's writing desk and the flickering tiny screen of her precious portable television. She seems to believe that if she looks away from it, it will vanish.

Just as I'm about to.

At four o' clock, I am seated in the back of a passenger van in motion. There are no windows; by the variations in our motion, I estimate we are traveling at highway speed. We sway in unison on the black vinyl that covers the thin padding of the bench seats. The van's side doors are across from me. Steel pull-handles. The doors swing out when opened. I can't reach them, though, or the double doors at the van's rear, to my left. Two reasons. Four, really: the two men to my left and right, cradling machine pistols in their laps. The two men across from me, to the left and right of the doors, likewise armed. And the fact that my ankles and wrists are shackled to the wall and floor of the van. If I tried to run, I would have to take it and all its black Ford tonnage with me. The fracture in the humerus of my left arm is now five weeks old and mostly healed, though it still aches and I still fear to move it incautiously. They didn't fear to move it when they shackled me.

Which means they're taking me to be killed. Indicator two of two.

Indicator one: the fact that I wasn't expecting a transfer. The company arranges those only for boys and girls who have been good. Boys like Jackson Rippner, bless his arse-kissing heart. For me, the "t" word will be something other.

Transferred, no. Terminated.

#####

An hour ago, in Warden Stratton's office, I asked: "Transferred where?"

Warden Stratton was conserving her words today. Likely, her teenage fuckup of a son had managed yet another mishap with school, a girl, or the family car. "Somewhere up north."

"I'm within my rights to inquire."

"The confidentiality is for your protection, Wheeler."

I had no privileges to lose. "Fuck you."

"We'll see that your personal property is packed and sent."

"I want to speak to my lawyer. Now."

"He'll be in touch when you reach your destination."

Proof positive: if my lawyer would be waiting, I was being sent to hell.

The van is windowless, but at least they haven't black-sacked my head. I tend to become claustrophobic when blindfolded. The van lurches, and the steel wall behind me knocks against my skull.

#####

#####

Sink-or-swim-Saturday, they call it. Lisa and Cynthia. The guy who's the replacement for backstabbing ass-rat Eric Janssen at the Lux is working his first Saturday night as lead receptionist. Cynthia and Jeff Anderson, the junior doorman at the Lux, stop by to have a look at the new place. Sincere apologies abound: they would have come earlier, to help shift boxes and furniture, but they both had to work. By eight, glowing like a pair of kids on a Norman Rockwell _Life_ cover, they're off to the movies. I suspect that both Cynthia and Lisa have given the new guy their cell numbers. I find myself frowning: I feel I know his name. Like an itch at the nape of my neck.

"Dave Huxley-?" I say, half to myself.

"I know; I thought it was weird, too." Lisa smiles at the quizzical look on my face. "David Huxley? _Bringing Up Baby._ Cary Grant, remember-?"

"Oh." Reassured, for the queen of Turner Classic Movies I remove my frown. "That's right."

#####

#####

The plane is late, departing. We meet it on the tarmac, a white Mitsubishi twin-jet. They let me walk as carefully as I need to up the wheeled stairs; given the shackles on my legs and the clumsiness they bring, I'm unlikely to be mistaken for Elizabeth Taylor or Natalie Wood. I glance toward the cockpit in hopes of seeing something that will indicate our course or destination; the guard behind me sees me looking and jabs me in the shoulder of my bad arm. I don't give him the satisfaction of a flinch.

Seated, we wait. Me chained. No one speaks. I pick out the youngest, the most vulnerable, of the guards, and I commence staring at him. I stare until he breaks eye contact. I stare until he's staring stoically straight ahead. I stare until he's staring uncertainly at the toes of his black tactical boots. Then I look away.

By the time we take off, the sun has set. I cannot tell which way we are going. No one comes by with a rumbling metal cart of drinks and snacks. Flying is getting shittier by the second these days. I close my eyes and go to sleep. Always sleep when you can, my mother likes to say.

#####

#####

Enough moving-in for one day. Lisa and I make ourselves a housewarming dinner. Salmon steaks and couscous. White wine, salad, steamed asparagus. She's leaning over the table, laying out plates and napkins and flatware. As I hover in the background, battling discreetly with the cork in the bottle of chardonnay, she says, casually:

"The memo you left earlier; I replied; I just wanted to confirm."

"Memo-?" It hits me, just as the cork pops loose. "Oh, right. Right-"

She straightens, watching me. I set the bottle and the corkscrew on the sideboard. From my front right pocket I take one of my utility Spydercos, an old, early model Delica. I open it one-handed, using the thumb-ring, as I go to her.

She looks at me without fear. Nothing but affection and intelligence in her lake-gray eyes. I can see the steady pulse in her throat, the subtle rise and fall of her breasts as she breathes.

I reach to the side of her neck with my empty hand and lift clear the ring I left for her Thursday afternoon. She didn't show it to Cynthia and Jeff. I think I can guess why: there are nerves, and there's Cynthia lighting up half the eastern seaboard because she's with her beau, and then there's Cynthia emitting a shriek only dogs can hear. We both smile as I cut the twine. I carefully slide the ring free; I unlock and refold the Delica and put it back in my pocket. Then I put the ring on the third finger of Lisa's left hand.

"Marry me," I say. I hold her hand and look in her eyes. "Please marry me, Lisa."

In response, she takes my face in her hands and kisses me on the lips. Slowly. Time lingers with the contact, that kiss and then another. This is a moment of demarcation for us, and she wants to make it last. Suspense trembles through me, a temblor passing along my spine. She's being thorough, though. Taking her time. She draws my lower lip gently between both of hers. I take her by the hips, move closer.

She kisses me once more, lightly. She looks into my eyes and says: "Yes. Yes, Jackson, I'll marry you."

I kiss her. "Just confirming, right?"

She nods.

I tip my forehead to hers, suddenly, quietly giddy. Suddenly in awe. We've officially become _us_. She smiles, and it's almost as if we're back at Ikea, standing in that showroom blazing with lighting fixtures.

"Mm hm. Confirmed."

She slips her arms around my neck. I put mine all the way around her and pull her close. The next kiss is like a shared solar flare. Just as I'm thinking that maybe the salmon will have to wait, the phone rings.

Other than Lisa, possibly three people have the number for my new land line. I assume it isn't the leader of the security team calling to say they've left behind a toolkit, or Paul Miller checking to see if my cable is working. I let go of Lisa and pick up the receiver on the third ring. "Yes, John?"

From Chicago, John Carter asks: _Am I interrupting anything, Jackson?_

"Do I really need to answer that?"

_We have a lead on your party line,_ he replies.

#####

#####

We taxi to a halt at the commercial airport of a nameless northern city at ten-eighteen p.m. I see the time on the digital watch on the wrist of one of the guards as I'm loaded directly from the tarmac into another windowless black van. I have neither the time nor the illumination with which to identify the airport at which we've arrived. I see nothing but the gray square bulk of a terminal building two hundred yards off. Boxy umbilicals unmated to planes, the dark mouths of cargo doors. In the distance, to my left, I see a city, nothing but a grumbling line of blacker moss at the black horizon, pricked with light. I think I can smell the ocean.

#####

Another bumping ride in a black windowless Ford. At our destination, we disembark directly at a sally-port. I'm introduced to it from the inside: a drive-in tunnel, steel doors at either end, walls of old red brick patched and reinforced with concrete. It's cold, or colder than Florida; I'm reminded how quickly we Northerners unadjust to brisk temperatures. We enter the building through a third steel door, my four escorts and I; inside, I'm passed, with a packet of paperwork, to two armed guards. They're uniformed in blue; my boys are in black. As my four file back out, I catch the eye of the youngest and wink. He looks away.

My new guards flank me as I stand before the desk of the intake officer. _R. Crippen _etched on his magnetic-clasp name-tag. We watch him check over my documents, the light from the fluorescents shining off the deforested dome of his skull. He reaches to his right, for a blank form in carbon-paged triplicate, and begins to write in cheap blue ballpoint. I lean an inch or two closer and read, upside-down, the header at the top of the form:

_GOTHAM ASYLUM FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE_

"I've never heard of this place," I say. He doesn't respond. I'm not merely trying to make conversation with good Mr. Crippen: never, either at university or in our crim-psych courses at the company, have I seen a single reference to a madhouse by this name. Not in the States, not in the former Soviet Union, not in the dark wilds of eastern Europe.

#####

Crippen kindly keeps things simple for me: I'm not asked to sign a single form. My intake guards return to their posts at the sally-port, and two female guards armed with truncheons, mace, and forearms the size of trans-Atlantic telecomm cables walk me through a dun-yellow concrete hall to the second-stage intake area. I am stripped and searched. Then I am allowed to shower. Important, this. It makes an impression. _Allowed to shower._ Not _showered_. Not shoved against the masonry wall whilst slipping on the filmy concrete underfoot and blasted with a hose. And there's hot water, too. Really, truly hot. I can't help myself: I close my eyes against the spray stinging my face and sigh as the heat seeps into my aching left arm and shoulder.

While I wash, the guard team takes my clothes. They box themselves into a black corner cam's gleaming eye and watch, corporeally unpresent, while a matron, tall and gaunt and uniformed in black, her dusty hair cropped around her fiftyish face, waits while I change into a jumpsuit of institutional gray and a pair of canvas, rubber-soled slippers. My manners so far must have impressed my keepers. The matron walks me, alone, to my new digs. Of course, cameras are everywhere. I sense there must be something else as well. Something truly hideous with which to reward the would-be escapee. That sense, coupled with the simple fact that I don't yet know the layout of the facility well enough to plan an effective flight, keeps me walking quietly straight ahead, with Matron at my elbow. She doesn't offer her name, and I don't ask.

I assume no one with an advanced degree and not just a temperature will see me until Monday. Without a word, Matron leaves me in a new private cave of greenish-gray brick and chipping plaster. There's an old porcelain-bowl sink, a toilet. An empty bookshelf, a steel-frame cot bolted to the wall. A window ten feet up the wall opposite the cot, just below the ceiling, a one-foot square of barred and dirty wired glass. A small table and one wooden-frame chair- which strikes me as odd, given the chair's heftability, its potential for being moved nearer the promise of escape via the window or, more spiritually, via suicide-by-light-fixture. Then I discover that the chair, like the table itself, is bolted to the floor, well out of reach of the ceiling lamp, a steel cage inside which the light from the too-small bulb seems to be trapped.

I lie back on the cot. The mattress is three inches thick, if that, but at least no springs jut up between my ribs and vertebrae. Springs would mean steel; steel would mean the potential for a shank, a shiv, a lock-pick. Or, again, suicide. A solid punch to one's own carotid, and one can bleed out in as little as three minutes. Couldn't have that in a respectable asylum for the criminally insane, now, could we? Blood in terminal quantity can make a hell of a mess. I fold my good arm under my head and look up at the cold moonlight coming through the wired window.

It's been a long day. I find myself drifting; I let myself go. I'm seconds away from sleep when the door-lock rattles.

I sit up. The door opens. It's Matron, flanked by two men in white-smocked uniforms who look to be straight out of _On the Origin of Species_.

"Dr. Crane will see you now," Matron says.

It must be nearly midnight. I blink away surprise and sleep in equal measure as I get up. "But of course."

#####

#####

It's always so easy in the movies, even in the oldies Lisa loves so much, finding a lead. Ironically, things take longer in the cyber age. But Paul Miller and his counter-hackers in Chicago have gotten a whiff of the person or persons who, under the direction of Rosemary Wheeler, hijacked my and Lisa's phone service and e-mail six weeks back. Now Carter says it'll be more secure if we discuss the hijackers in person, and of course he's right. Here the old rules still apply: it's a million times easier to check the walls for eyes and ears than it is to assure the security of a single phone line. Miller, John says, has me booked on an eleven p.m. flight out of Miami.

"Us," Lisa says, as I get off the phone. She's been listening. Her eyes have never left my face.

"You don't have to come," I say.

"Yes, I do." She caresses my cheek. "It's my life, too, now, remember?"

I pick up the phone and dial Miller's private number. "I'll be needing a second ticket for tonight's show, Paul," I say, and hang up.

#####

#####

Corridors of power. Corridors of insanity. The primates to my right and left don't share Matron's trust: they've each got me by an upper arm, death-grips from their gorilla's fingers, with no bloody regard for skin, muscle, or healing bone. En route to the administration wing, we pass through a hallway of heavy metal doors. Bolt-holes and tray slots. Beyond, moaning, muttering, an occasional broken howl. The walls here are gray-green bordering on nausea. The jumpsuit I'm wearing someone else has worn before. The fabric hangs heavily on my shoulders. The weave has been worn smooth and soft by washings and rewashings in hot water. Ill-rinsed. Bleach lingers in a ghostly burn against my skin. They've given me baggy knickers but no brassiere. I suspect my own clothing, not just the prison orange in which I arrived, is long gone. Not just my clothing: all of my things. I doubt the rules regarding personal property apply in an insane asylum. What good are the trappings when you're about to be turned inside out?

We pass through a reception-cum-security area and a locked, windowed door beyond. Beyond that, the walls smooth out. Plaster, parchment-colored. The floor beneath our feet is brown speckled linoleum, very old, slick with wax.

At a stereotype, we stop: a paneled oak door, the finish gone dark and sticky. A knurled brass doorknob, likely antique. To the left of the door, a polished brass plaque. It says

_Jonathan Crane, DPM_

The hulk on my left raps the door with a gorilla's knuckles.

#####

#####

Quick dinner, quick packing, a quick shower. Just enough time to catch the red eye. And then it's delayed. Irony meets deja vu. In the concourse of Miami International Airport near our departure gate, Lisa and I find a lounge open after-hours. We park ourselves in a booth, order drinks. Cranberry juice for me, Perrier for her. The wall next to us is nearly all window. From where we're sitting, we can see the mechanics servicing our plane. Figures in overalls move with worker-ant efficiency in and through an off-white pool of light beneath the primer gray of the MD-80's underbelly.

The airport is too quiet. "Tell me about you and Rosemary," Lisa says. "What was she to you, Jackson? What _is_ she?"

I turn my glass slowly on its coaster, and I feel myself locking down. As if shutters are closing between my eyes and my soul.

Only for a moment, though. For a moment only.

So elemental as to seem ridiculous: the idea that I could share my body with the woman sitting across from me, trust her in the most intimate physical ways possible, in nudity, in sex, in sleep, even in sickness, and not share with her anything she might want to know about me. Ridiculous that the body should be more honest than the mind.

She prompts: "You and she were pretty hot and heavy once upon a time, weren't you...?"

Her tone is patient but droll, too. I smile slightly at my glass. "If I tell the truth, will I be sleeping on the couch for the next two weeks?"

"That depends."

I meet her eyes. "On what?"

She looks back at me as directly as she ever has. "On how hot and heavy the truth really is."

We have time. The ants are still swarming beneath our Boeing. I take a sip of juice while I decide on a starting-point.

"Mad Jack, madder Rose," I say. "That's what Carter used to call us."

#####

#####

A three-count follows the knock. Then a voice calls, male, quiet, second-tenor-to-baritone:

"Come in."

Primate the second reaches far enough out of the primordial ooze to operate the antique doorknob. He opens the door, and we enter a semi-dark office. The age of the door follows us in. The walls all around are lined with heavy, packed wooden bookshelves. The air smells of varnish and must.

Across from us, in the periphery of the pool of light cast by a brass desk lamp, a man sits facing us. "You and Mr. Tate can leave us, Mr. Mowbry."

He speaks without looking up. He's slight and brown-haired, and a good charcoal suit very poorly tailored is bunching at the points of his thin shoulders. He's hunched like Bob Cratchit over his desk. There's a flatpanel monitor to his left, but the screen is dark. He's writing by hand in a college-sized notebook bound in what looks like black leather. The pen he holds is too large: it looks almost like a log gripped in his bony fingers. Pretentious as well: Mont Blanc. Deadly, too: You can put the tip of a standard stick-pen through someone's temple. A Mont Blanc can puncture the forehead. That's the thickest part of the human skull.

I once saw Jackson kill someone that way. Youth and arrogance. We were in the Czech Republic, and he was showing off. "Don't even need the fucking knives." He panted as he spoke. Excitement, not exertion. Certainly not fear or revulsion. He wiped the pen clean on the mark's shirt, the bits of brain smearing like feta cheese and raspberry compote on the white weave of the cloth. He gave me the pen. "Souvenir," he said, smiling. I still have it.

Or I did, in my life prior to institutionalization. My Mont Blanc is silver. Doctor Crane's is black.

"Doctor." Mowbry proves to be the primate on my right. He nods, and he and Tate back like elephants out of the room. Like they're leaving the presence of a trainer in the circus. I sense the memory of physical punishment in their heavy, careful motion. I feel, too, the bruises forming on my upper arms, and I wonder how their larynxes will feel, crushed between my fingers.

I'm not playing along. When the door closes behind me, I say: "I may have delusions of grandeur, Dr. Crane, but I'm not crazy. What the hell am I doing here?"

He looks up, and shock jolts through me.

He looks exactly like Jackson.

Or not.

Pretermitting the initial fact that he's wearing a pair of self-consciously stylish silver-rimmed glasses, he's like Jackson damaged if not broken. Jackson as seen in the warping of a cheap mirror. Jackson if his pieces didn't fit together quite as they should.

He looks at me with Jackson's eyes. Only his are, if anything, colder. A bit watery, too. Weak. Others might well stop at the chill, but I know his eyes and I know his type: I see before me a spindly boy who's been shoved one too many times into doorframes and lockers, and who's been trying desperately all his life to hide his humiliation. "Good-" He half-frowns, half-smiles, glances at the clock on his desk. "- morning, Miss Wheeler. Have a seat, won't you?"

#####  
#####


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Sorry for the delay, but this second chapter turned out to be a beast. A big, weird, twisty beast. Grab a cup o' Joe, settle back, and enjoy. And thanks for all the hits and comments. Very much appreciated!

#####

#####

"Please."

With his Mont Blanc, Doctor Crane gestures graciously toward a heavy wooden curve-backed chair to the right of his desk. He shifts his own chair back slightly as I approach. He's obviously creating a polite space for us, but the impression I have as he moves is of something slightly feral retreating into a hole. As I sit down, I feel a sudden need to make small talk.

"You remind me of my ex." I find myself concentrating to keep my voice steady. Simple explanation, really: it's been a long day, and I'm undernourished. I haven't eaten since the state-funded bologna-on-white of lunch.

He smiles, keeping his lips pressed together. "Is that good?"

I let my eyes say _No_ as my mouth says "Yes."

I see now, from close up, how much his eyes are like Jackson's. So clear as to seem liquid. Like icewater that might gush suddenly from the skull, leaving wet empty sockets. The slight sleepy droop of the upper lids, the stare direct but not unblinking.

"That's… practically incestuous," he says.

"I beg your pardon?"

"We look a good deal alike, you and I."

I realize he's right. Or he'd be right if he were Jackson. I may think myself too angular to be traditionally beautiful, but I'm certainly not weak-looking. I look like Jackson, not like this little crooked man.

I say, nonetheless: "You'd be the prettier one."

He smiles again, almost primly. "And you the handsomer. Do you have brothers, Miss Wheeler?"

"Rosemary. Please."

"Rosemary: any brothers?"

"It doesn't say in my papers?"

"Indulge me."

"Two brothers, older. Three and five years, respectively."

"What was your relationship like, growing up?"

"Limited. Our parents split when I was eight. Mum took me to live in New York—"

"Your mother's American?"

"Yes. Dad's British. Brian and Dan stayed with him."

"They're successful, Brian and Dan?"

"Yes. More than—More traditionally so than I am. Brian's a businessman; Dan's a barrister."

"I see." Again he looks at the clock; I half expect him to say, "Time's up." Instead, he says: "Please forgive me; I've forgotten my manners." He looks back at me, brightly. His teeth show in a dead man's take on a host's smile. "I seem to do some of my best thinking late at night. Are you hungry?"

The "Yes" I manage not to blurt comes out instead as "Umm-"

"How about sandwiches? And- I'll guess- tea. Something hearty. Prince of Wales-?"

An old office phone squats like a toad on the surface of the desk near his right elbow. I watch him pick up the heavy black receiver, finger-tap a button. When he speaks, he sounds like he's ordering room service.

He offers his thanks to the cooks in the bowels of his madhouse; he hangs up; he again turns his attention fully to me.

"I understand you like disguises," he says.

The promise of food relaxes me. "So _that's_ in my dossier, anyway." I smile slightly. "Yes: full-facial latex is my forte. I trained with vocal coaches and movement specialists as well."

"Difficult, isn't it? With the limp?"

He noticed it when I came in. Without looking up, he noticed it. Either that, or he's been watching me since I arrived. I tend to forget about the damage to the hamstring of my right leg. Or I tend not to think about it. When I _do_ think about it, I hate myself for being weak enough to have it. And I hate Jackson for giving it to me. For now, I picture the black camera eyes unblinking from the ceiling corners here in Arkham. I remember the shower when I arrived, the wonderful hot water, and feel chilled.

I feel slightly aroused, too.

I make my smile full but cool. "I take it off when I'm working."

His expression changes to mirror mine. A most un-Jackson-like smile on Jackson's full lips. "Do you impersonate men as well as women…?"

The first question to catch me off-guard. I look at him for a long moment. Remembering.

"Yes," I say.

#####

#####

Lisa and I are still hungry. Or hungry again. The problem with eating in a rush. In contrast, the ground crew swarming around our plane seems to be in no hurry. That's for the best: Lisa is a nervous flier, and we'd both just as soon the mechanical team did more than a half-ass job. From the appetizer menu in the lounge, we order pot stickers and spring rolls, and I tell her about me and Rosemary and our first job together. Probably our best job together.

It's eight years back. Vadim and Alik. Aliases, by the way. Father and son. Fifty-three and twenty-two years old, respectively. Dad is top dog in a province of a former state of a republic whose name should also remain unspoken in order to protect the wicked.

Happens that a handful of geologists in Vadim's province have struck oil. Or more oil than is proportionately proper in a province of this size. The state sends guys in to claim it for the greater good, et cetera; Vadim's guys drive them off. Seems Vadim wants to work for the _greater_-greater good. He doesn't, of course. Pseudo-communist bullshit. He wants money for his oil and he wants it from the world at large. He wants that money free and clear of the middleman to his east.

Let's leave him nameless, the big man to the east. Let's just say he's two seconds away from firing up the tanks and the mortars and turning Vadim's province from pine forests into a sea of bloody mud.

That's where Rose and I come in. Our side wants Vadim's oil, only they'd just as soon not deal with Vadim to get it. They'd really just as soon not deal with Mr. East after he's all jacked up from having to pound the shit out of Vadim, the upstart warlord to the west. Our mission is to get Vadim out of the picture so that our people can slot in someone a little more willing to kiss up to Mr. East.

We can't just shoot him. Vadim's cronies in the province would blame it on Mr. East's cronies; they'd all dig in and clam up, negotiations would collapse, and next thing you know, we'd be back in that sea of bloody mud.

We decide to take him out and pin it on Alik. Vadim is practical, which is to say paranoid; Alik is the only one who can get in good and close to him. Mom is out of the picture; she died when Alik was six, and Vadim never chose a replacement for her. Seems there was genuine affection between them; now he gets his kicks from the occasional one-night-hire. Male or female, doesn't matter. That'd be the easy way in, obviously: Rose tells me he'd probably choose me over her, but I'm in no more of a hurry to make my first big job a suicide mission than she is.

Which leaves precious Alik. Who, since Mom died, has been allowed to run wild. Dad adores the little shit. They're headquartered in a big old house on the outskirts of- let's call it "Greb," a mix of weed-and-rust industry, sixteenth-century cobblestones, crappy Spancrete, and William Gibson blue-glow high-tech- kind of long and crumbling and sloppy, but fortified to the fucking gills. Alik is out every night with the boys. Drugs, clubbing, booze. Underground shit. Dog fighting, cage fighting. Vadim sits home like Dracula waiting for the sun to set. No: he's a legitimate, dyed-in-the-wool homebody. He's got a good library; he's got a good gym; he's got the latest in home-theatre technology. He's got the ultimate black-market cable package. In short, Dad is on the sofa watching the multi-feed box while Junior is ripping Greb a new one after-hours.

One thing, though. Vadim loves his kid. And Alik loves his dad right back. Vadim has a province to run; guy's in bed by ten-thirty every night. No matter where Alik is, no matter what he's doing, at least four nights out of seven he'll drop it, head home, and kiss his Dad goodnight. Doesn't phone it in. Right at ten-eighteen he'll walk past the guards at the front door, the guards at the stairs or the elevators, the guards fifteen feet from the door to Dad's bedroom. He'll sail in, smiling and high as a kite, and wish his papa sweet dreams. They'll chat from ten-twenty 'til ten twenty-nine. Then Alik is back off to the coke and the dogs with Vadim's blessing and Vadim's kiss on his forehead, and Vadim is off to dream about all the money he's going to get for his oil.

Rosemary and I are in a safehouse in Poland, mulling over plans. We've already nixed the prostitute idea. Poison is out, too: Vadim has a taster, and toxins would bring us right back to "blame Mr. East."

"You're going to be Alik," I say.

"I am, aren't I?" she replies.

One of the things she'd said when we first met, some three months earlier: "We could be the king and queen of androgyny, you and I." Coloring-wise, build-wise, height-wise, we're pretty much the same. At first look, we might be taken for blood. Now as then, she seems to get off on the idea.

Alik must have gotten ninety percent of his genes from Mom. Neither he nor Vadim can be over five-foot-nine. Vadim might've been good-looking thirty years back, but now he has a face like a rutted dirt road. Keeps himself in shape, though. Alik is a skinny kid. He has a junkie's body. But he's pretty. That sort of effortless pretty, undeserved. Tarnished-angel stuff. Golden-haired, blue-eyed.

A day later, in that Polish safehouse, Rose has his face auto-cadded and molded in skin-thin latex. From a Crayola cascade of shifting colors, she selects and casts a pair of contacts that will replace the gray in her eyes with ionosphere blue. Already, she can move like he does. Sauntering, loose-shouldered. Smooth and hypnotic as a sidewinder. Right hand in pocket, around the handle of a knife, a bag of pills maybe, a pack of Blackjack gum. He loves his gum, he loves his drugs, and he doesn't do his own driving.

That's where I come in.

He has a loose, shifting pack of friends. He patronizes a handful of drug dealers. One afternoon in Greb, I replace one of the fingers on that hand. Seems the poor fucker OD'ed. The black-tar heroin he was pushing was a little too black. Why you should never sample from someone else's stock, let alone your own.

I have an old-fashioned sample case, the obligatory leather coat with a labyrinth of pockets, tiny baggies of powder, packets of pills, the dirty hollow eyes of a man who's been up for days and nights waiting for destiny to stop by. I have a quick smile, an easygoing Polish accent, good shit at fair prices. And I have a box-nosed black BMW E24 6 that puts the slack-ass Mercedes of Alik's pals to shame.

At first, three weeks or so out, it's a carful of us. I partake only as much as I have to to maintain cover- you don't say no to every line of dust or you're a cop: it's that simple- so I'm designated driver practically every night. Three or four in the back, male and female. Eventually Alik calls perpetual shotgun, and no one argues. Maybe he has a bit of a crush on me; maybe he just likes to watch the streetlights and taillights making molten streaks through the rain on the windshield. From club to club we go. Making rocket-runs on the concrete six-lane, striking sparks from the undercarriage when we bottom out on the cobbles in town. My sample case in a compartment in the trunk next to where the spare tire would go, if the Beemer weren't on Kevlar run-flats. Not that the cops would dare search us if they stopped us. Alik, not God, is my co-pilot.

One night, finally, it's just me and him. Just past midnight. It's cold. The air smells of toluene and snow. I want to be home in my cruddy thin-walled flat, seven floors up, with half a dozen blankets between myself and the fickle heating.

"Let's go to the dogs, Iggy," he says.

My stomach tightens. People tearing the shit out of each other: I don't mind that. Animals are another thing.

I smile. "Sure thing, Alik."

We head to an old furniture-finishing plant on the west side of town. Two-story concrete, windows on the office floor up top, no windows on the floor below. A twelve-foot wire fence around an icy mud yard that's serving as a parking lot. We skirt close to the building with the Beemer, park in back. A dozen dirty cars are there ahead of us, half of them Western luxury, half of them cheap local junk.

We walk in, past two men in leather jackets, maybe five hundred pounds the pair. A short, block-walled entry hall, and then we're into a bar. Tables, wooden chairs, rows of bottles, mostly vodka, on rough shelves. It's then I realize I'm being set up. There are dogs here, but they're not fighting. I catch the sharp kennel stink, hear barking but no snarling. No rabid shouting. What's more, there are dogs loose in the dark room. Seven, maybe, milling among the men present like hounds waiting to be mustered for a hunt. Big breeds. I see a brindle mastiff, a Presa, the mangy gray of an Irish wolfhound. It's a little surreal, like a watering hole for dogs as well as men. A rust-colored American pit-bull terrier breaks from the crowd and comes, as if called, directly toward me, head high, tongue lolling from its broad jaws, stump tail wagging.

I stand still, but I don't tense. I hold my right hand slightly ahead of my body. The pit bull's face is scarred; there's gray around his muzzle. He moves stiffly. Likely old tendon damage to his shoulders. He sniffs and then licks my fingers, and I scratch the warm fuzz of his domed skull, between his cropped, torn ears.

"I will be God-damned," Alik says.

"That you will." The speaker is mid-to-late fifties, average height, solid weight that looks to be a good percentage of muscle under a black leather coat, a charcoal sweater. Coarse black hair shot through with gray, penetrating shale eyes around a hawkish nose. He's flanked by two men, a bald giant to his right, a short, slope-shouldered wraith to his left. "You haven't brought a dog, Alik." He looks at me. "Or have you?"

The giant looks at me and snorts. "He's brought a _bitch_, Vardan."

"Certainly seems as though Arkadiy has taken a liking, Koja," says the wraith. He looks down at the pit bull and parts his lips, showing yellow teeth. "Maybe he thinks he has a chance with her."

"Old dog. Worthless dog." Koja takes a Beretta from a shoulder holster. "Dead dog."

He shoots Arkadiy through the head. He nearly shoots my thumb off in the process.

The old dog's legs go out from under him. His last lungful of air sighs out of him as he drops. My hand, my jacket, and my jeans are splattered with blood. He slumps half on my right foot, twitches once, hard, against my shin, and goes still. I take a deep breath and pull my spine straight.

I watch the big man, calmly, as he re-holsters the Beretta. From the corner of my eye, I can see Vardan studying me, assessing my reaction.

"Who is he?" he asks Alik.

"His new pusher." This from the man to Vartan's left. He has oily black hair, bulging Boston bull-terrier eyes. He laughs, and spit flecks from his teeth. "Been selling candy to the kiddies under the tables in Metropolis. I've seen him."

"Is this a joke, Alik?"

"No-"

Koja looks at me. "Let me kill the little bitch, Vartan. Let me teach Vadim's boy a lesson."

Vartan turns to Alik. "You know the rules here-"

"Yes, I know-"

"No one leaves without a fight. You have no dog. Therefore-"

"I'll fight," I say. I'm looking at Koja. He's looking back. "I'll fight him."

Koja smirks down at me. "You want so badly to die, little bitch?"

"We all die eventually."

"Some sooner than others." Vartan shrugs. "When he's dead, we keep his stock and his car, if he has one, and if it's worth keeping." To Alik, he says: "We'll consider ourselves even, then. For you coming in here and wasting my time. Is that fair?"

Alik's eyes are bright. I can see him shaking under his jacket. "That's fair," he says.

The dirty little fuck won't look at me. He steps off to the side with Vardan and Vardan's pop-eyed weasel while the barroom floor is cleared.

No weapons. At opposite sides of the room, Koja and I remove our jackets, our shirts, the boots that might conceal knives or toe-tip razors. The concrete floor is greasy and cold beneath my bare feet. Tables and chairs are dragged back to the walls. Arkadiy's corpse is lifted like a sack and thrown outside. A table leg smears a reddish-brown slash from the pool of blood congealing where Koja shot him.

In a semi-circle of tables, men, and dogs, Koja and I approach one another, elbows down, fists up, shoulders hunched but loose.

This has to be quick. Vardan's ape is a block of muscle, and if he lands a square shot on me, I'm dead. But I'm fast. Very fast. Not only that, but his shooting the dog has me mad: I'm more than willing to fight dirty. Suddenly I close the distance between us. I'm in under his guard, and I'm back out again before he can grab me.

His left eye is in my right hand.

Koja takes a step toward me before he realizes what just happened. Then he stops, shocked. He shakes his head, hard, and blood splashes down his face.

I step in again and rocket the knuckles of my left hand into his larynx. I hear a muffled crack. His eye widens; he wheezes. He grabs for me with hands like front-end loaders and misses by a meter. I move in for the third and final time: I grab him by the ears and yank his face into my rising knee. Dual cracks now. You can't punch the nasal bone into the brain: that's impossible. But now, in addition to that missing left eye, he has two orbital fractures. He's stunned. He's doubled over. I get my right arm around his head. I brace my right hand on his jaw. I hook my left thumb into his left ear, reach around the back of his head with the fingers of my left hand. I throw my left elbow down, my right elbow up, and Koja's neck snaps.

I drop him. He slumps to the floor and doesn't move. Gut down, face up. Staring at the ceiling with his remaining eye.

The bruisers at the door seem to give us a bit more room as we leave. Outside, Alik lights a cigarette, blows smoke into the wind.

"Man, that was _incredible_."

I have to keep myself from swearing or hitting him. "Sure."

"Come on, Ig: lighten up. You were like fucking _Batman_." He grins. I must not look entirely pleased. He can't pry the idiot glee from his face, but he manages to make his eyes at least semi-serious. "At least think of what we won."

_We._ I hate this shit. "What's that, Alik?"

"Respect."

"Your dad could have those guys killed. Am I right? Every guy in that fucking building."

"Yeah. But this we did on our own."

I nearly kill him on the spot. He sits against the front fender of the Beemer and finishes his cigarette. Why he can't just get in is beyond me. I'm shaking, from adrenaline, from sweaty cold. I feel dirty and sick. I can feel the blood crusting under my fingernails. I want to be away from this place, away from Alik. I want a fucking shower and some sleep.

"I knew you were special," he adds, slyly.

I frown. "What-?"

He drops the butt of his cigarette, stubs it out in the freezing mud. Nothing sexual in his posture or expression. When I realize what he means, I nearly find myself wishing there was.

"The way you moved in there- You don't fight like a drug dealer," he says. "Let me guess: ex-army? Maybe even special forces-?"

"A prohibited-substances-related discharge? And a year in the brig to go with it?" I force a rueful smile onto my face while my heart thumps. Seems I'm greener at this shit than I thought I was, and I've come this close to blowing my cover. "Right, right, and right."

He grins. "Whatever, whoever, Iggy: you are fucking amazing." He reaches over, smacks my shoulder. He reaches into his jacket pocket for his pack of Blackjack and gets in the car. "C'mon. Let's go home."

At his father's house, we share a bottle of vodka. Maybe half a bottle after that. It's good stuff, meaning it's too smooth. It goes down as cool and soothing as spring water, and I drink too much of it. Alik shows me to a room in his wing of the house. The west wing, as moldering as the east. I fall asleep, tired and unshowered and more than a little drunk, on a rough woven comforter.

An uncertain time later, I wake up. Someone is sitting at the foot of the bed, watching me in the dark. I nearly knock the lamp from the bedside table, reaching.

Sharp brown eyes in a weathered face. Stark cheekbones, thin lips. Mercury-gray hair combed back off a high forehead.

Vadim looks at me in the light and says: "You'll look after Alik?"

My cover must have checked out. Ygor Pietruszewski, Polish national. Born in Kalisz, 25 May 1976. Court-martialed from the Land Forces 26 July 1999. No siblings, parents deceased. A long, slow slide into a thin-walled flat in Greb.

He says nothing about the drugs. He hates me. He has to: I'm a dealer, and his son is getting poison from me. He's just trying to find something good in an odious situation. He could have me killed, but Alik would find another parasite exactly like me. Or worse.

The converse, of course, holds true, too. He's less than six feet away. I could kill him right now.

But there would go the plan. I myself would be cut in half by men with Kalashnikovs thirty seconds later. And Rosemary would be furious at not having a chance to try out her disguise. I have to ask myself which of the three thoughts gives me the most pause.

"Yes," I reply.

"You are welcome in our house. Goodnight, Mr. Pietruszewski."

#####

A day later, we're on. Alik trusts me; Rosemary is good to go.

#####

"You're practically my private driver. My bodyguard."

On the way to another city, to another thumping club with another Fritz Lang-sounding name. We're on a two-lane road, driving thirty kilometers an hour above the posted speed limit. There was a dusting of snow earlier, but the weather is clear now. The headlights push back the pitch blackness dropped from the sky; the light caroms off the slashing canopy of pine branches overhead.

As luck would have it, we're alone. Me and Alik, the sample case in the trunk. No calls, either incoming or outgoing. He likes to see how people react when he just shows up.

With his good dog.

_Good dog, Jackson._

Twenty-five kilometers from town, in the middle of black-forest nowhere, I tell him I need to stop. I had one too many Czech beers back at the Metropolis, and nature is calling.

"Weak bladder." Alex chuckles. His elbow is against the bottom of the window. He's leaning his cheek against his fist, watching the symmetrical pale trunks of the pines flash by outside. "First sign of age, old man."

#####

I pause here, in a late-night lounge in Miami International Airport, at the point where the Beemer rolls to a stop on the crunching gravel of the shoulder. Where I shut off the the motor, get out, toss Alik a packet of white powder while I step to the back of the car and pretend to unzip while he leans over the line he shakes out on the hood. Lisa doesn't have to know the details. The kid is about to die, and I'm about to kill him. That's enough.

#####

"What did you do, Jackson?" She looks at me very directly and says, "Tell me."

I can't argue with that look.

I tell her everything.

#####

He's leaning over the warm hood of the Beemer. I walk up beside him. He thinks I want a line; he makes room, moves to the side. I grip the back of his skull, smash his face into the hood. Then I take him by the head, much as I took Koja, and I wrench his neck. The vertebrae snap like branches. The pop echoes back through the trees.

#####

"It was quick," Lisa says, quietly.

"Very quick."

It's the past. Obviating the shock, the betrayal (if one could resent betrayal at the hands of a pusher), it's likely he didn't suffer. Maybe his one death prevented the deaths of many others. I can't know what Lisa is thinking.

But she knows who I was. She knows who I am. I reach out, tentatively, rest my hand over hers on the table top. She knits her fingers with mine, squeezes gently, and holds on.

"What happened then?" she asks.

#####

I drive back to town, meet Rosemary at the Metropolis. Alik's body is in the trunk of my car, wrapped thickly in industrial-weight plastic. His shirt and jacket are folded on the back seat. Rosemary is wearing a scarlet top that might as well have stayed home, for all the cover it provides, a leather skirt in blatant defiance of the season and the latitude, calf-high boots. We linger at the bar long enough for a drink, an exchange of small talk. Long enough to make our meeting look like an assignation. She laughs softly at a joke I don't tell; she whispers nothing in my ear as her hand slides higher on my thigh. She gets her coat, and we leave together. In her shoulder-bag, she has men's boots, jeans, a golden-blonde wig, and Alik's face. She climbs into the back seat of the Beemer and changes while I drive.

"You managed not to get blood all over the shirt. Good job, Jack."

_Good dog, Jackson._

Rosemary's voice, coming from Alik's face. She'll lower her pitch, adopt his language, his cadence, his accent, when and if she has to. She's an incredible mimic, Rosemary is.

There's an operational steel mill ten kilometers from the west side of town. Rosemary-as-Alik and I drive there. It seems we've had an unfortunate "accident" with a prostitute. Alik has had such accidents before. He told me about the place a week ago, lauded its convenience as an impromptu crematorium. More romantic, he thought, than dumping a corpse in a ditch or a river. Something noble, practically honorable, about committing a body to the flames. And, for the right price, the night foreman is only too happy to play undertaker.

We pull up to the hangar doors of the main building; a balding, heavyset man in dirty gray coveralls steps out, sees Alik's face on the person in the passenger seat, and motions us forward. Inside the building, I put the Beemer in park and get out. The air stinks of oil, coal, and heat. Rosemary, a skin-thick layer of latex between her and the world, stays where she is. She lights a cigarette, sits smoking it with shaking hands. Keeps her Alik-blue eyes fixed glassily on the dash.

"It's in the boot," I say to the heavyset man. "This one has him rattled."

"Shit." The man looks more closely at Rosemary. "Really out of it, isn't he?"

I reach in my jacket pocket, hand him a roll of bills. "Absolutely fucking heartbroken."

He takes the money, grins. Three more men in grimy coveralls have drifted from the volcanic depths of the mill. Baldy gestures them closer.

"A special additive for the mix in furnace sixteen," he says. He catches my eye and points back into the mill, into the fire-and-darkness. The hot iron jaws of hell. "Right that way, sir. Lev will show you."

The heat sucks the oxygen from the air. Like a physical presence, a huge animal breathing directly into our faces, even through the windshield. It's almost as if I can feel the water in my skin cells turning to steam. I watch from the driver's seat of the Beemer, and Rosemary watches, too, from behind Alik's face, his blue eyes, as Lev and his two cronies carefully feed into a tank of white-hot steel the plastic-wrapped body from the trunk. Immortality in the form of rocker panels, refrigerator cases, maybe a ferry hull to come.

Three minutes later, Rosemary and I are back on the road. The steel mill is a dark hulk receding in the rearview mirror. A fading orange glow to mark the opening of the hangar doors. No trace of heat. The cold swallows it up, stifles it.

_Goodbye, Alik._

He's not dead yet, though. Not quite. His ghost lingers next to me, or his imprint does. Rosemary is relaxed now: all the fake-addict twitch has gone out of her, and she's lounging loose-limbed in the passenger seat. I drive her home, to say goodnight to Vadim. I stay in the car, pretending to smoke a joint, listening to Black Heart Procession on the satellite radio, while she walks Alik's walk through the front door. Ten minutes later, she saunters back out. She pauses, just past the guards, long enough to light a cigarette. Then she comes back to the Beemer and gets in, and we drive away. She rests her head on the headrest, closes her eyes, smiles as she hums along with the radio. She doesn't have to say a word. Back at the house, Vadim is dead in his bedroom upstairs, a hypoful of fast-acting poison in his veins. The hard drive to his laptop is in the inside pocket of Alik's coat, to the left of Rosemary's left lung. On that laptop are the numbers of, and passwords for, Swiss bank accounts. The accounts into which Vadim has already begun to deposit the sizable advances from his oil buyers.

At approximately ten a.m. tomorrow, Vadim's men will believe that Vadim's ratty little son murdered his father and departed for parts unknown, possibly in the company of his new best friend, ratty little drug-dealer Iggy, with the digital key to Dad's treasure chest.

Back to the club we go. On the way, Rosemary lowers the passenger-side window and casts the wig and Alik's face into the darkness. The latex will decompose within three hours. She keeps the jeans and the boots. She exchanges Alik's shirt and his jacket for a nubbled brown sweater and an old red North Face parka from a garbage bag I have in the trunk. At the club, I leave in the Beemer my dealer's coat of many pockets. I have to admit, I'll miss that car. Rose arrived at the Metropolis just over an hour ago, before our trip to the mill, in a gray late-model Audi wagon. Four-wheel-drive, yellowish mud splattered up in the wheel wells, U.K. plates, a round white GB sticker on the tailgate. Granola-bar wrappers and empty water bottles on the floor, no smell of cigarette smoke. In the back seat, I find a worn blue crewneck sweatshirt, a gray parka. Just outside town, Rosemary pulls over. From her bag, she produces a contact-lens case, a pair of wire-rim glasses with plano lenses. She takes me by the jaw and turns me to face her; she switches on the light on the passenger-side vanity mirror. Where it would have taken me a minute or more to insert the contacts, it takes her thirty seconds, tops. She puts the glasses on me, musses my hair. I glance in the mirror. My eyes are now hazel brown. She pulls back into the travel lane, and we drive for the western border. As our papers and passports, the maps and the travel guides and internet printouts, the duffels of rumpled, practical clothing, and the packets of trail mix and crisps scattered throughout the Audi will attest, we are now a young British couple finishing up a Lonely Planet driving tour of the wilds of eastern Europe.

We cross the border into Poland; we enter Warsaw as the morning sun reaches through the Audi's dirty back window. We're on a twelve-forty commercial flight to London. Coach. Rosemary takes the window seat and goes to sleep. I stay awake, reading an Ian Rankin paperback I found in my mock-up duffel. The air in the plane is making the contacts itch, and if I fall asleep with them in, there'll be hell to pay later.

#####

By half past one, the mechanics working in the muggy Miami night air have resuscitated our plane. Boarding is a zombie-shuffle of catatonic faces, a weary hefting and stuffing of carry-ons, a flat clunking of the doors to the overhead bins. Lisa, unlike the rest of us, is absolutely alert. I see her eyebrows lower, her jaw tense, as we pass through the cabin. I offer her the aisle seat, and she takes it gratefully. For a number of reasons, and for several of which I know myself to be the cause, she feels trapped, sitting next to the bulkhead.

Her shoulders bunch as she fastens her seatbelt. As we taxi away from the terminal, without a word I take her hand.

"Are you tired of talking?" she asks.

At the head of the runway, the plane hunkers down like a cheetah tensing its muscles. Coiling under itself haunches of steel. We roll, gain momentum. Lisa's fingers tighten around mine.

I squeeze her fingers in return as our wheels leave the tarmac. "Not if you're not tired of listening."

#####

The food arrives. Mr. Mowbry knocks and then enters, carrying a silver tray. The sandwiches are too elegant to be standard hospital fare. We have roast beef with coarse mustard, sliced chicken with tomato and crisp dark leaves of romaine lettuce. The tea is perfectly steeped. Again comes the thought that the fear of pain underlies the quality of our impromptu late-night dinner, but I'm ravenous. I force myself to eat slowly. I have to keep my stomach settled, and I can't appear too eager. Not yet.

Doctor Crane eats delicately, almost cautiously, as if tea and sandwiches are foreign to him. No: almost as if _all_ food were something alien. He frowns then smiles, almost subconsciously, as he chews. Savoring, thoughtful. He doesn't speak, and neither do I.

We finish the last of the triangle-shaped halves, rinse our throats with final swallows of tea. He dabs his lips with a linen napkin and says:

"I like disguises, too. Would you like to see my mask?"

"Certainly." Setting down my cup, I nod. _Humor him._

From the deep bottom drawer of his desk, he takes a burlap sack. _You have to be joking,_ I think. He removes his glasses, carefully folds the bows so that they'll fit within the protective confines of a rigid black leather case. Then he pulls the sack over his head. It's exactly that, nothing more. Two holes for his eyes, a hole for his mouth. Coarse, primitive, not a little silly. He settles back in his chair and looks at me. Deprived of the expression in their brows, his eyes are somewhat inhuman. He raises his right arm and gestures toward me with his hand. A casual flick of his wrist, as if he wants me to fix a cufflink for him.

I hear a hissing.

Then I smell the gas.

A sweetness, a trace of lilac. Like the smell of someone with a head cold or bronchitis. How the respiratory viruses have evolved, how they survive, how they pass themselves from human to human: we smell the sweetness, and involuntarily we breathe it more deeply in.

We draw the sickness well down into our lungs.

As I've just managed to do. My respiratory system performed its duty before I could think _Wait-_.

Crane watches me from inside his mask. I watch him. Habit: I find myself counting the seconds. After a minute has passed, he takes off the mask and drapes it carefully onto the desktop. His eyes are mildly unfocused as he reaches for his glasses. He emits a measured sigh, picks up the Mont Blanc, and writes something on the left-hand page of his notebook. I don't bother trying to read it: his handwriting exceeds even the standard for physician illegibility, and the notebook is angled away from me as well.

"What was that, Doctor Crane?"

His lashes flicker behind the lenses of his glasses. Here, he and Jackson are exactly alike. A girl's eyelashes. Or lashes any woman would kill for. The flicker betrays surprise.

"A neurotoxin," he says, casually.

My voice is as calm as his. "You've poisoned me."

"Not exactly. Hardly a fatal dosage. But your reaction is most unique."

"How should I be reacting?"

As I ask, I feel something crawling on the skin between my shoulder blades. A spider, likely. A small one. A place like this- ancient, dusty, full of pocked mortar and old plumbing- must be full of them. I reach over my left shoulder, behind my head, beneath the collar of my coveralls. But the wire-tickle of the feet is lower, just out of reach-

"An itch, Miss Wheeler?" Dr. Crane asks.

"No- It feels like there's something-"

It stings me. A sharp acid burn over my fifth thoracic vertebra.

"Bastard-" I hiss.

Dr. Crane smiles. He smirks. He shares that with Jackson, too. "I beg your pardon?"

"There's an insect on my back." My heart is starting to race. "It just bit me."

He rises, leans obligingly around me, looks. I feel the warmth coming off his skinny body as he does. Not a vital warmth, though: more like a lizard convecting the heat it's stored. He smells of pine tar soap, vintage cologne; his clothes exude the musty scent of old wool.

"I don't see anything," he says.

"It's under my-"

It bites me again. Harder.

"- _shit_-"

Dr. Crane isn't looking at my back. He's looking at my face. He re-takes his seat and watches me as the sting goes from sudden to ongoing-

"I think it's-" Awkwardly, I claw between my shoulder blades. "Could you call for a medic, please? Please-?- It's-"

_It's burrowing into my back._

There are parasites that dig their way into the body. Through the skin, the flesh below. They deposit their eggs in muscle tissue, in the blood-

Tears fill my eyes. I stop pawing at my spine and grip the arms of my chair while the thing tunnels into my back. I'm trying not to panic; I fight to keep my voice calm. "Doctor Crane, I hate to sound weak, but-"

Tapeworms. Roundworms. The larvae of blowflies. Guinea worms gestating, growing to arm's length or better, then tunneling their way back out-

"What is it, Rosemary-?"

I can feel them twisting in my stomach and intestines. Writhing, a white tangle of living string, around my heart. Squirming leech-fat beneath my skin. I rock forward in my chair and start to sob.

"Help me-"

He leans in closer, until his face is inches from mine. He lays a soothing hand on my right shoulder. "I've removed my mask, Rosemary," he says, softly. "Why don't you remove yours?"

Tears blur my vision. My shoulder shakes beneath his fingers; I nod. Through the sick fear of the things in my body comes the thought: _That would feel better, wouldn't it-?_

Never mind the fact that I can't remember whose face I might be wearing over my own. I try to see myself reflected in his pale eyes and can't. But he's a doctor; he's right: if the latex comes off, I'll be able to think more clearly. I'll purge myself of the worms. There are treatments, medicines. All I have to do is face the world as myself.

From bottom to top. That's how I prefer to remove my masks. Typically, the disguise terminates in the region of my carotid pulses. I hook my thumbnails under the edge of the latex and pull gently upward. That's what I do now. Doctor Crane gives me room. He settles back in his chair and watches me.

I peel the masking upward, and I feel a sting under my right cheekbone. No surprise there: it's not the first time I've torn a bit of skin, pulling off a disguise.

But this time it's different.

It's as if I can feel a vein pulsing where the skin tore. I touch my cheek.

Stickiness. The stinging sharpens. I look at my fingertips.

They're covered in blood.

"Oh, my God-"

With the fingers of both hands, like a blind woman I explore my forehead, my cheeks, my chin and jaw. Everywhere I feel pulp. The tapioca marbling of fat through strands of muscle. I feel pain, exquisite, breathtaking, and raw. And I realize I've torn off my face.

_I've torn off my face._

The last thing I see before I start to scream is Doctor Crane's expression.

He's smiling.

#####

#####

As the MD-80 levels out, Lisa relaxes, though she's still content to retain custody of my hand. I tip my head against the mottled cloth of the headrest, settling in for the flight. She turns to look at me; I gaze back at her, thinking.

I've told her a bit about me and Rosemary as a team. I've told her about a job, about business. She wants to know about _us_.

Maybe she's not the only one feeling nervous right now.

#####

Following our our flight out of Warsaw, Rosemary and I are scheduled for three days in a London safehouse. Seventy-two hours while the company's intel team brushes away our metaphorical footprints, erases all traces of our mission, makes sure we weren't followed home.

We're not the best of roommates. Rosemary starts by demanding beer and pizza- Pizza Hut, yet, for God's sake- and it's all downhill from there. She commandeers the remote for the television, and somewhere among a hundred channels on the European side of the Atlantic manages to find one that serves up NASCAR twenty-four hours a day. At living volume. I pray for the neighbors to file a complaint, and then I curse the place for being bomb-proof, radiation-proof, soundproof. I curse the assholes who invented surround sound, and the assholes who installed it in here. All I want is yoga, greens, and sleep. I need to unwind. By the second night, I've had enough. I pick the remote off the table by her bed and switch off the T.V. She gets up, half-smiling, half-annoyed, and tries to take the remote back from me. I hold it out of reach, get my free arm around her, pull her in close, and kiss her.

Rosemary draws back, but doesn't break free. We're still touching. She takes me not by the jaw but by the throat just below. Where she can feel my pulse. Gauge its pace. Gauge my level of arousal without reaching lower. Apply pressure, physical or mental, as needed.

"You don't have to kiss me to get me into bed, Jackson."

It's near sunset. The light is like blood watered through the dirty window behind her, and damp winter cold is seeping through the walls. I'm coming down. From the drugs I took as part of my cover, from the high of killing. The fact remains, though: I'm still jacked up about the mission. More deeply I'm worked up about completing the job efficiently, as planned. I'm a mess of chemicals and tension. I'm hard as hell.

"Let's go to bed, then."

She doesn't smile, though she bares her teeth. Her eyes are self-satisfied and calculating. "No."

I know I need to sleep. What I want is to get to sleep by getting off. I don't want five minutes in the bathroom with myself in one hand and a wad of toilet paper in the other.

We've had sex before. Right after we met, in fact. It seemed good to me; I thought it seemed good to her. "You want it, too. I can smell it on you."

"You're smelling yourself. Go jerk off."

My temper gives way. I shoulder her onto the bed. She tries to hit me, and I catch her hand. I swing my elbow into her diaphragm and hear the wind go out of her. I pin her arms and force my way between her thighs, close enough so that my needs are perfectly clear.

I stop there. In and out, rough and unsynchronized, our breathing knocks our bodies together. I look down into her eyes. "Yes-?" I prompt.

"No."

I take a deep breath, let it go. I get up. The bed frame creaks as I move clear of her. She takes me by the shirt front, then by the shoulders, and pulls me back down. I'm on my forearms above her. I lean in to kiss her, and she slaps me, hard. It hurts. She tries to hit me again, and I catch and pin her wrists.

"Bitch," she hisses. She doesn't struggle. She knows as I do that we've stalemated. Then she leans up. I hold my breath as she scrapes her incisors against the skin of my throat.

"Bitch," she says again. This time it's a taunt. A whisper.

I let go of her wrists. Rosemary's eyes don't leave mine as she reaches between us to unfasten my trousers.

She begrudges her body heat. We screw to a finish; she holds me while we shudder and grow still; she rolls me off of her. We lie beside one another, panting. The room is even cooler now that sweat is evaporating from my skin. My body shifts itself back closer to hers, gravitating instinctively toward warmth.

Rosemary says: "You've got your own side, Jack."

She pushes me away and rolls onto her side, facing the nightstand. At least she doesn't reach for the remote. She turns off the light. I pull the bed's flat sheet and blanket up, cover Rosemary as well as myself, and lie on my back beside her. It's cheap bedding, and the polyester of the blanket itches against my chest. My stomach is tense with cold.

#####

In the morning, she's still with me. More than that: she's curled herself against my side. She's half-pinning my right arm.

I can't help myself. "Hypocrite," I say, to her closed eyelids.

Rosemary opens her eyes, looks at me, and pushes away, digging her elbow hard into the crook of my arm as she does.

"Fuck you," she replies. She manages to make it sound as much a regret as an insult. She sits up, stands, walks to the bathroom. I hear the lock click when she shuts the door.

I'm returning to the States; she's remaining in London for a couple of days, to visit her father and older brothers. She follows me out to the black company Saab that's to take me to Heathrow. I shut my bags in the trunk, and Rosemary offers me her right hand. Her grip is firm as we shake.

"Good job, Jackson," she says. She doesn't quite smile, but her eyes seem less hard. "Until next time."

"Until next time, Rose."

I get in the car. As we pull away from the curb, I don't look back. I tell myself I don't need to know if she's watching me drive away.

#####

#####

Mr. Mowbry re-enters Doctor Crane's office. Again, Mr. Tate is with him. They half-drag, half-carry me back to my cell. I've screamed myself hoarse, and now I'm sliding into shock. I'm whimpering and keening with pain. They lay me on my cot and leave. I lie curled on my side, and I can feel my skinned flesh sticking to the thin mattress. The cover is soaking with blood. Hundreds, thousands, of capillaries in the face. I feel my consciousness leaking away with my blood, and I'm paralyzed with fear.

I'm bleeding to death, and they're doing nothing to help me.

#####

#####


	3. Chapter 3

When we reach Chicago, Lisa and I hit a second snag. A minor one, really: Paul Miller would have agreed to meet with us at the company's office up until four a.m.; now he won't see us before nine. Fair enough. We haven't slept, either. A nap sounds good. I open up the apartment, check my messages, check the corners and the closets, too. No lurkers, no obvious signs of burglary or tampering. The grocery service has left staples in the fridge, on the kitchen counter. Milk, instant oatmeal, juice, frozen dinners, a couple of apples. Lisa and I drop our bags and settle in. But we don't go right to sleep. In the upstairs bedroom, she gets us both out of our clothes and takes me, thoroughly. More roughly than usual. It's quick, quiet, very intense. Afterward, she kisses me tenderly. She nuzzles my throat; she nestles against me. "I love you," she whispers. I whisper it back to her. The sun is edging in molten threads around the blackout blinds, and I'm holding her close as I fall asleep.

#####

Four hours later, we're downtown, pushing through the revolving doors into the lobby of the late-Forties six-story sandstone office building that serves as a front for the company's home base. John Carter meets us at reception. He's business-casual, which for him means he's without a suit jacket, but he's in dress slacks, not jeans, and a gray silk tie is knotted squarely at his throat, under the white pressed collar of his shirt. He's probably come straight from early mass. Despite his vocation, he takes his Catholicism fairly seriously. He has a sober smile for both of us and a visitor's pass for Lisa; he rides with us in the elevator four floors down to Information Services.

Paul Miller is waiting for us in the pack-rat cavern he calls an office. He rises from his desk chair as John raps on the doorframe; he turns to greet us. An awkward moment follows. Paul looks at Lisa with icewater eyes. She looks back at him.

Finally, she says, "You must be the competition."

Paul's pampas-grass eyebrows flicker into a frown. He glances at me. Then his expression melts into a grin, and he offers Lisa his right hand. "I must be." Lisa smiles back as she shakes hands with him. "Christ, what a grip," Paul says, wincing. "For God's sake, Jackson, do us- at least do your dick- a favor and pass her off to your sister."

He winks as he brushes past me into the hall, walks us to the meeting room four doors down. Lisa gives me a querying look as we follow. Paul and his preferences, his maybe-crush on me, she knew about, but she has yet to meet Milla. In terms of sexual proclivities, my younger sister isn't exactly a shrinking violet. I lean in close, whisper in her ear: "Ask me later."

In the conference room, armed with a multimedia projector and a pile of printouts, Paul reveals the identity and location of the man who's most likely responsible for blocking the electronic airwaves between me and Lisa, with nearly fatal results, five weeks back. Andrew Brinkman is a midlevel systems analyst for a major purveyor of intellectual data based out of Ontario. Andy works at the company's office in London, England, but, as fate would have it, tomorrow the company's flying him to Toronto for an on-site seminar.

Lisa looks up at the face on the whiteboard. Our Andrew is in his late thirties. Round face, coarse, short brown hair, black-brown eyes, wisps of beard on a recessive chin. The kind of face you'd see in a medieval re-enactment on the History Channel. Second pikeman from the left, ignorant, dirty, and doomed, hoping to get fed if not paid. "Good thing I brought my passport," Lisa says.

"Ah- As for that-" Paul rummages in his briefcase. "You'll be using this one instead."

He reaches across the table, hands her a new passport. I lean closer as she opens it. It looks identical to her old one.

"Completely invisible," Paul tells her. "You won't make a lingering blip either going across the border or coming back."

"Standard issue, Lisa," John adds. "Welcome to the team."

Only I see her start. A tremor in her brows, that's all. She's just crossed a line here. Old life to new. Or old life to _maybe_.

She turns and for moment looks at me. We're not touching. I'm sitting still, and I can feel her in my arms. She smiles slightly; she looks to John and Paul.

"Thank you," she says.

#####

We break for lunch. John and Lisa and I drive in his old blue XJ-S out to his and Claire's place. It's turned into a bright, warm May day, and it's a Sunday, which is typically family time in the Carter household. John and Claire are pretty old-fashioned about it. Theirs is a brownstone to end all brownstones. As I understand it, it was Claire's one condition for bearing the Carter brood. It's a hundred and ten years old, perfectly restored, a mile from Lake Michigan, a block from a park, an eccentric but elegant half-castle in a tree-lined street full of them. It's narrow on the outside, huge on the inside, and whoever designed the place had a hell of a sense of whimsy. Lisa's observant, and as we cross the sidewalk and ascend the steps, she's taking in the details: the daisies, lilies, and violets carved into the granite stair caps, the angels and demons, the gargoyles, even stone pigeons watching with round, blank eyes from four stories overhead. John disarms the security system, keys the locks, opens the front door.

The entryway hall is already full: Claire is there with the the three Carter girls. Coordinated chaos, a long-legged tumult. Sweatpants and t-shirts in the wood-paneled passage. The eternally tousle-headed Mrs. Carter is balancing on one foot on the jade-green tiles as she pulls on a cross-trainer. She grins when she sees us, but Moira, the oldest of her daughters at a brand-new fifteen, and the most like a two-thirds-sized version of her lanky, wild-haired mom, is the first to say, "Hi, Jackson."

I smile at her. "Hello, Em."

Golden-haired, quieter Aileen, or Carter daughter number two at nearly thirteen, is the first to focus on Lisa, though she's not the first to speak to her. "Lisa: greetings!" Claire says, catching Lisa by the shoulders and planting a kiss on each of her cheeks.

Lisa hugs her. "How are you, Claire?"

"A perfect mess, as always." She looks to John. "What's up?"

Carter lays out the plan: whatever we can find for lunch in the kitchen, paperwork, the last of our end of the logistics for a trip across the border. Claire listens, and then she turns to Lisa and asks, abruptly: "Might we borrow you, Miss Reisert?"

"We're going for football and bagel dogs," says Vera, the youngest Carter, as dark-haired and dark-eyed as her dad, as outspoken as her mom, and just short of eleven.

Lisa looks politely bemused. Moira explains for her: "Soccer in the park. Two on two. With you, we have enough to swap in a goalie."

"You play, don't you?" asks Vera.

"Not much since high school, but, yes, I-"

She looks to me; I nod toward the door. "Go on. Go stretch your legs. John and I still have a heap of intel to paw through. I'll get you caught up later."

Claire looks sly. "Sure you wouldn't care to join us, too, Jackson?"

"We don't want Jackson," says Aileen. She's the slightly too-smart one, and somehow she seems to be completing her mom's thought. "He plays like a girl."

"No, Leena." Claire catches her around the shoulders in a rough-and-tumble half-hug. "Jackson plays like an American _man_. _We_ play like girls. There's a difference." To Lisa, she says: "Em can get you some kit. You're practically the same size."

"C'mon, Lisa," Moira says. Lisa gives me a smile, a shrug. I watch her as she goes off with the eldest Carter daughter in search of shoes and gear. Claire is watching, too. Her face has gone still. When she sees me noticing, she re-animates; her sea-blue eyes turn wry. "We'll try to have her back in one piece."

"You'd better."

"I might want to talk a bit of business," Claire adds, with a sidewise glance at John. "In which case I'm charging the bagel dogs to the company's expense account."

John snorts. "The hell you are."

Vera looks at him disapprovingly. "You can't say 'hell' on Sunday, Dad. Remember?"

For a second, John seems genuinely embarrassed. "Sorry: I-"

"Sinner." Claire grins. She gives him a quick kiss on the cheek, and then she and the younger two troop outside. The door shuts behind them.

John opens his mouth, closes it again. He scowls at the door. "But then _she_ gets to say that _I _can't say- Oh, never mind."

"Should've just said 'yes' to the bagel dogs, John."

"I'm still learning, Jackson. Give me eighty years or so, and I'm sure I'll have it all figured out." He loosens his tie, shakes his head. "I'm trapped. I'm trapped in a house full of women."

I smirk, though I'm wondering what Claire might have meant by "business." She's not usually one to contaminate her leisure time with work. John makes sure the door is coded, then leads the way to his office. We leave the entrance hall and cross to the left, through the ground-floor living room, to reach it. Behind us, I hear Lisa laugh. I turn just in time to see her and Moira pass by in the hall. They're talking; they don't see me.

Claire was right, though. They are practically the same size. They might pass for sisters.

I'm thinking this as I follow John into the den, and in my mind I'm seeing the stillness in Claire's face. The blue of her eyes as deep as Superior, not Michigan. As dark as the North Sea in winter.

#####

It's five years ago.

I'm standing under a November sky. Clouds like sodden gray felt. I park around the corner from the Carters' brownstone, and the wind pushes me to the front steps. Dry leaves tumble past on the street as if they're fleeing Godzilla.

I ring the bell, shove my hands into my coat pockets, hunch my shoulders against the cold blowing in from Lake Michigan. I eye the street while I keep one ear tipped toward the intercom.

Behind me, the door opens. I turn.

It's Moira. She watches me with her father's too-dark eyes. Her hair is her mother's, but chestnut, not ash-blonde, shoulder-length and perpetually unruly. From both her parents she gets her height: she's tall for her age.

She's ten going on twenty-five. "Hi, Jackson."

"Is your dad home, Moira?"

"No."

"Your mom?"

"She and Vera went to get Leena from her cello lesson. Do you want to come in?"

I nod, step in when she steps aside. I shake the cold from my coat as she shuts and locks the door. I can't get the chill out of my chest.

"You're home alone?" I ask.

"It's Bering's day off. I have homework."

Bering is the Carters'- it's hard to say exactly what. She's former Canadian military, early middle age, single, nearly silent. As far as I've seen. Tall, lean, short brown hair, nearly colorless gray eyes. She's been with the Carters since Moira was born. I suppose that makes her a nanny, but no one hoping to keep their front teeth intact would dare call her that. Retainer, governess, bodyguard, companion, drill sergeant: she's any and all. Loyal, affectionate, as lethal as necessary. I once asked John what her first name was. He said he didn't know.

So Moira is ten years old, and she's here by herself. Some would call this irresponsible on John and Claire's part. I don't feel qualified to judge.

Still, I ask, as Moira leads me back through the foyer to the living room, "Your mom warned you, didn't she? About opening doors to strangers?"

She takes my coat. Her eyes are patient. She looks at me as though to say, _Such childishness is beneath us, isn't it? _"You're not a stranger, Jackson. Anyway, I saw you on the door monitor."

We're at the heart of the Carters' castle. There's a maze of rooms, I know, around us, above and below. In total, an incredible amount of space. And security and comms systems that would put Langley, let alone the Pentagon, to shame. All in a late-nineteenth-century package that Jules Verne or H.G. Wells would have died to own. Moira leaves me to pick a seat on the sofa or one of the overstuffed chairs while she hangs my coat in the hall closet.

She's like a princess, I think. Not in that she's spoiled, but in that she seems to have an aura of responsibility, an awareness of her being an heir to the Carters' kingdom. Deep down, beneath all the appropriations and hierarchies, the company is theirs, all theirs.

Someday it's apt to be hers.

She comes back in. No: she re-enters the room. Ten going on twenty-five. Back straight, shoulders relaxed, eyes returning immediately to her guest.

"Would you like something to drink?" she asks.

On impulse, I say, "Milk. Please."

I know she chooses to ignore the irony. "Is skim okay? Dad drank all the two percent."

"Skim is fine."

#####

So it is that I'm sitting on the sofa with a glass of milk in my hand when Claire comes home with daughters two and three. She gives me a nod, only the merest hint of surprise on her face, and then I wait while she deals with coats and boots, a massive tote, a bookbag, a junior-sized cello case. Moira helps.

"How's your math coming, Em?" Claire asks her eldest.

"Fine, Mum," Moira replies.

"Good." Claire cuffs her gently near the right ear, her fingers getting lost for a second in the wilds of her daughter's hair. She pulls her in and plants a rough, affectionate kiss on the top of Moira's head. "Get Leena started on her spelling, okay?" She looks to Aileen, and to her youngest, too. "You: draw me a seahorse."

"Blue or pink?" Vera asks.

"Blue. With a starfish, too. And a stingray. A purple-spotted one. Hop to it, girls."

The three of them troop off to the den, and Claire turns to me.

"What can I do for you, Jackson?"

For a moment, I don't answer. I'm watching Aileen go off with her sisters, and in my mind I'm seeing a photo of another little girl. Eight years old, light hazel eyes, honey-colored hair.

Her father suffered more in the final ten seconds of his life than he had in the entire forty-six years that came before. I shudder.

Claire sees. She nods toward the glass in my hand. "Would you like something more substantial?"

"No, I'm fine."

"You don't sound like it."

She folds her long legs, sits herself in one of the stuffed chairs opposite the sofa, fixes me with eyes like the North Atlantic in winter, and waits for me to talk. I know she has one ear tuned toward the den, but the girls are apparently going quietly about their homework, and the concern in her face as she looks at me is real.

"I want to work unteamed," I say.

She doesn't ask the obvious question- _Did something happen between you and Rosemary?_ But she does say: "Why 'unteamed' and not 'alone'?"

"Less dramatic, don't you think?"

I don't mean to sound defensive, but I do. "And therefore more dramatic by default," she observes, mildly. "By way of misdirection."

"I was going to say I want to work _a la carte_."

"You should have gone with your instincts."

She gets up, goes to the liquor cabinet. She's Scottish, Claire is, and most stereotypically and marvelously so by the quality of whiskey she and John keep on hand. She unstacks two thick-walled tumblers and pours into them two good stiff jolts of fifteen-year-old Laphroaig. She crosses to the sofa, and I set the glass of milk on the coffee table and accept from her the whiskey she offers.

She re-takes her seat on the chair opposite, sits back, sips. I do, too. The Laphroaig burns a trail of sweet, smoky fire down my throat, stokes warmth in my belly. The alcohol tells me, in one of those moment-and-gone fantasies of incipient intoxication, that I could fall in love with this woman. Moment-and-gone. Then I'm back to reality: Claire is my friend, and as her friend in turn I _do_ love her.

"I'll let John know," she says.

"Thanks, Claire."

We finish our drinks. She continues to watch me. As I'm unwilling to verbalize my troubles, it seems only fair. Unlike most people, Claire loses none of the focus from her eyes as she drinks. If anything, her gaze becomes more intent. Not harder: deeper. As if she can see the sky from the ocean floor, through eight hundred feet of pitch-black water. It should be disconcerting, I suppose, or chilling, this look. Maybe even insulting, a challenge. I find it comforting. Always have.

"Something happened," she says, finally. It's not a question. She doesn't need to ask for details. Whatever it was was bad enough to rattle me: that's all she needs to know.

I'm more than half certain she doesn't need me to tell her that Rosemary was responsible, either.

#####

#####

#####

I wake up. I'm dehydrated. My mouth is dry; my head aches.

But I'm alive.

There's a clear plastic tumbler standing on the table across the cell from my cot. A clear plastic pitcher of water beside it. I'm too thirsty, too disoriented, to be cautious of drugs. I stumble on shuddering legs to the table. My right arm is weak; the pitcher slops and spills as I pour. Water splashes a piece of note paper folded on the tabletop.

I gulp the first glass of water, another one after that. Breathlessly. Water dribbles down my jaw.

Cool on my skin.

I set down the tumbler, press the fingertips of both hands to my face. Smoothness. Light traces of down along my jaw. No stickiness. No blood.

No pain.

I unfold the note and read. Black ballpoint. The hand is loose and high-flown; a drop of water like a tear blurs the ink.

_Feeling better? Let's talk._

_J. Crane_.

I remember the sweetness of the gas. All that followed was hallucination.

I whisper hoarsely to the note: "I'm going to kill you, you little son of a bitch."

#####

#####

#####

Two hours later, Claire and her daughters return Lisa, sweaty, bagel-dogged, and amiably roughed up. Apparently, Miss Reisert gave as good as she got. For a second, just after they left, I felt guilty about not warning her that the Carters seem to recognize little, if any, difference between what Americans think of as "soccer" and what the rest of the world considers "rugby." But she's athletic, and she's adaptable, and by the look of things, Lisa has unofficially become the latest member of Claire's team of hellions. We depart the brownstone on good terms; we leave John to enjoy the rest of his Sunday and take a cab back to town. Paul will be calling later with the final details regarding Toronto.

She's sincere and energetic with her goodbyes, but once we're away from the Carters, Lisa goes from quiet to too quiet. Her brows don't lower, though; watching Chicago pass by outside the taxi, she appears to remain relaxed. Whatever she and Claire discussed over soccer and bagel dogs has left her thoughtful, not angry. I don't pry. If she has something to tell me, she will.

Back at the apartment, she phones the Lux. She needs a few days off, she tells her boss, for reasons of personal emergency. She doesn't give Robert Cleary the details, but I know she's not exaggerating. Confronting the person or persons who hijacked your phone service and e-mail, and who were in addition part of a larger scheme to have you and your entire hotel blown up, would seem to qualify as an emergency.

"Julie can spot for me if need be," she tells me, after she hangs up. Julie Weber, a true platinum-blonde iron lady, who took a slug through her shoulder from Rosemary's Walther five weeks ago, when Rose tried to go bomb-crazy at the Lux. Julie might not be quite up to wrestling kegs away from drunken frat boys or cold-cocking thugs-for-hire, but she can cover the front desk.

"And Dave wants extra shifts, too," Lisa adds.

"Dave-?"

"David Huxley-" She prompts, patiently, when I look blank: "The new guy-?"

"He's 'Dave' already?"

I try to sound casual. I fail. Lisa's eyebrows lower just slightly, maybe an eighth of an inch.

"Are you jealous?" she asks.

I look at her as evenly and guilelessly as I can. "Yes."

Her right-cheek dimple gives me a wink. "Just because he's six-foot-three and looks like Cary Grant?"

"Young Cary Grant? Pre-nineteen-fifty Cary Grant-?"

"Of course."

"Fuck."

She laughs; I smile.

"He made it perfectly clear from day one," she tells me. "It's 'Dave,' not 'David.'"

An excuse to look into her eyes, even if it's one we both know she doesn't have to provide: she respects me as much as I respect her, and cheating doesn't enter our equation. But there's something else, a kind of darkness below the blue of her irises, deep in the granite-gray. Not dishonesty but a troubled secrecy, and, frankly, it flummoxes me. I find myself trying to ease into the question-

_What did you and Claire talk about?-_

- and for a moment I'm stalled. Without putting the query out there bluntly, with all the tact of a riot stick to the skull, I have no idea how to proceed. I can't imagine Claire talking girl-talk ever in her life. She must have seen Lisa's ring; she must know we're engaged; I'm certain the congratulations were hearty and sincere. Beyond that-

Before I can say anything, Lisa asks: "Jackson, why did you and Rosemary split up?"

I nearly say, "That's not important now-"

I stop myself.

Maybe someday I'll be able to steer our conversations. Get her to tell me the things I want to hear when I want to hear them. Right now, maybe I'm too in love with her.

Not that I'm complaining. I can wait.

The grocery service left a six-pack of Goose Island IPA in the refrigerator. I open a bottle for Lisa, one for myself. In the living room, I sit with my back against the arm end of the L-sofa; she settles herself in the crook. I take a cold, clean, bitter sip and pick my words.

#####

Five years ago, October, in a city that looks like a vintage Warner Brothers take on Algiers-

I'll call him Ari. He looks like a watchmaker. A delicate-seeming man. Maybe a hint of winter goldfinch about him. His movements are quick and precise. His hair is shot through with gray, but it was wheat-brown to begin with. Its color and the color of his suit complement one another. Beautifully tailored, double-breasted, a sheen of bronze to the wool.

He's well dressed, unassuming, harmless looking. He's directly responsible for the deaths of four of our agents, at least a dozen civilians.

We're in an older luxury hotel at the edge of city center. Not trendy, but not decaying, either. He's stayed here before, in the company of either of his two mistresses. It's taken us weeks of planning to get him here today. While I walk him to the room the company has reserved in his name, I explain to him just how much trouble he's in: "You haven't been selling _our_ secrets, Ari. You've been selling _yours_. Do you understand?"

The implications don't register visibly, though he does, indeed, comprehend. His thin face remains calm. We might be discussing a minor business deal, not an abruptly, and very personally, impending fatality.

The open-cage elevator carries us to the sixth floor. I've let him see the Walther in my jacket pocket; I don't need to prod his ribs with the barrel to get a nod out of him. As he understands it, he's about to be exposed as a double agent against his side, not ours.

We go to the room, enter. I motion him to the bed, and he sits down. I tell him to take off his shoes, and he does. Sets them neatly side-by-side on the floor next to his stockinged feet. Like slippers. The plan, once Rosemary arrives, is for him to lie back and break a cyanide capsule between his teeth; when he's dead, she and I will leave; the hotel staff will find his body in the morning. When I tell him the company will protect his family, he caves pretty quickly. His legacy for his wife, his son, his daughter: the names of the three men planted with him among our intel people.

Now we have only to await Rosemary's arrival. Data we've captured from their side has been encrypted on his laptop at home, ready to be "sold" to us. Its sources are multiple and all traceable to him. Half an hour ago, Rosemary left me in the hotel bar, ostensibly to check something with our extraction team. She was being evasive. We play the role of the young cosmopolitan couple very well, and we're meant to leave together. Her becoming suddenly mysterious, especially this close to the end of a mission, is something I don't need. She said she'd be back in five minutes. She lied.

From the hall side of the door comes the sound of a key slotting into the lock. Rosemary enters. I don't look at her, but I can practically feel the energy radiating off of her.

"He isn't dead yet," she says. "Good."

I ask, quietly: "Where the hell have you been?"

She ignores the question; she's looking at Ari. "I wanted a word with him."

"I've already told the young man what he wanted to know," Ari says.

"That's good." Rosemary smiles. "What I'm about to say is for you, Ari."

I watch, gun in hand, as she moves closer to him. As she leans in so that she's looking him levelly in the eyes. And a cold slowmoving wave of shock breaks over me as she says to him:

"Your family has gone on ahead. Just thought you should know."

"My family-?"

"Your wife, your son, your daughter: yes. They'll be waiting for you." Her expression is mocking and cold. "Your little girl put up quite a fight."

He nearly cries out when he realizes what she means. He explodes up off the bed, grabbing for her. Rosemary aims a punch at his head, and I shove her away.

"No." I keep my voice quiet and flat. "No marks-"

I'm speaking as Ari refocuses his attack on me. He's not a fighter, but rage is making him strong, and he's flailing. His face is a mask of betrayal and grief. I shove him back toward the bed. He steps on one of his shoes, loses his footing. I step to the left, remembering that he's right-handed, get a grip on his collar and the knot of his tie, and shoot him in the right temple. We seem to jolt in unison, in shock. Then he takes a last twitching step, and his legs buckle. As they do, I get my left shoulder into his midriff and muscle him back onto the bed. I seat him, a moment of equilibrium, a posing. And then I move clear and let him slump. He tips onto his left side, into the blood splattered on the bedspread.

Rosemary joins me, panting. "Nicely done, Jackson."

"Shut up."

It goes without saying: we have to be out of here as quickly as possible. I wipe the Walther clean, place it in Ari's right hand. I straighten his tie, his collar. I straighten the shoes beside the bed. I turn to Rosemary, let her check me for splatter, for powder-stippling. She tidies me as I just tidied Ari. In return, I smooth a strand of hair away from her face. No tenderness in the touch. I might as well be slapping her in slow motion.

"You didn't have to lie to him," I say.

"Who said I was lying?"

#####

"These are tough economic times, darling," she says, in the company-friendly cab that's taking us to the airport. "I've just saved us the cost of protecting them. Today's lost lambs are tomorrow's marks. This was nothing but a preemptive strike."

She killed a woman and two children. On her own initiative. Ari's daughter was eight; his son was five.

I feel sick.

"You exceeded the parameters of the mission, Rose. You changed the plan."

"The plan was flawed; we both knew that-"

"That wasn't our call to make."

She's too high on adrenaline to be truly exasperated: she half-hides a smile as she rolls her eyes. "This made more sense: He realizes he's trapped. He knows he can't protect his family; he knows they'll be tortured and killed once his people find out he's been selling us their secrets. So he does the humane and loving thing and kills them himself, after which he comes here, to an old, familiar haunt, and kills himself, too. With- yes, before you ask- the same type of gun, if not the same gun, he used to shoot his wife and children. Initiative, Jackson. That's what I call it." She squeezes my left thigh, just above the knee. "Anyway, you're a fine one to preach."

"How many bullets did he use on them, Rosemary?"

"Four. Two for his wife, one each for the little ones."

I think of my gun in Ari's dead hand. "And he took the time to reload before he shot himself?"

"Why, yes he did. You know how thorough he is. _Was_."

She unleashes the other half of her smile, looking forward through the front seat and the windshield of the cab. It's as if she's just seen a particularly enjoyable play. I don't say anything more. I watch the traffic, the lights, the nightlife of the city passing by the greasy window next to my head, and I try to convince myself that I know the difference between killing and murder.

#####

That was our last job together. A week later, I was sitting on the Carters' sofa drinking whiskey, while in the next room a little girl who might have been Ari's murdered daughter did her homework with her sisters. As for Rosemary-

"She got tagged for psychological re-evaluation," I tell Lisa. "Could happen to any of us at any time; the psych team picks names at random. We never worked together again. Last I heard, before she left the company, was that she'd been designated re-trainable. She wasn't deemed unstable enough to- umm-"

"To terminate? To be killed?"

"Yes."

I finish my beer, set the empty bottle on the block table that sits inside the L of the sofa. As she's been doing for the last twenty minutes, Lisa watches me thoughtfully. Not accusingly. I'm grateful for that.

Her beer is two-thirds gone. She turns the bottle slowly in her fingers as she says: "They didn't draw her name at random, did they?"

"John must have tipped them off."

"Why not Claire?"

For some reason, that catches me off-guard. "I suppose it might have been-" I frown, weighing the question against what I know of the company, of John and Claire and their working partnership within it. I've always assumed that while she's a go-to, he pulls the strings. I look at Lisa; she meets my eyes. "Lise, when you were out today with Claire and the girls, what did-"

The phone rings. I check the display on the base set on the table next to my shoulder. "It's Paul Miller."

Lisa stands as I reach for the handset. She sets her bottle next to mine on the block table. "I'm going to grab a quick shower."

I nod her way as I thumb the TALK button. "Yeah, Paul-?"

Lisa, in passing, leans in to kiss my cheek. I watch her sprint up the stairs to the master bedroom as Paul gives me the final details for tomorrow's surprise visit in Toronto with one Andrew Brinkman.

#####

Eight minutes of conversation that boil down to this: Lisa and I are booked on a ten a.m. flight to Pearson International; Paul has reservations waiting for us in a Toronto hotel a block from Mr. Brinkman's. The rest is ours to improvise.

_Don't let that steel-fingered hellcat keep you up all night, Jackson,_ he says, before we sign off. _You have a busy day tomorrow._

"Yes, Dad."

I hang up. Lisa, of course, is still upstairs. I consider checking to see what the grocery service left for us in terms of freezer food, but getting the final details for a mission always leaves me jacked up. I need to burn off some energy. I could throw around the kettlebells, but what I really want to do is get out and move.

The water is still running when I go upstairs. I hear Lisa singing: the eternal battle with Pete DeRose's "Deep Purple," which she's coming ever closer to winning. She has a good shower voice. I change into running gear, write a quick note for her, leave it on the dresser by her purse. I take my keys, lock the front door behind me, and jog out into the cooling Illinois dusk.

#####

When I get back, she still hasn't come downstairs. The apartment is too quiet.

Alarm tingles in me. I stifle the impulse to call her name. I stand for a moment inside the closed front door, just listening. Sensing the atmosphere.

Nothing. No movement. No sound. No unusual scents, either. No cordite, not the stink of a smoker, the smell of a stranger's sweat or jacket. No odd musk of leather, the sweet varnish tang of polyester.

From the block next to the sink, I take the paring knife. I hold it blade-down-and-out, my thumb on the butt of the handle, as I cross the living room. The light by the sofa was on when I left. It's off now. I move in darkness to the stairs, pad up to the bedroom.

The door is open. There's enough illumination coming from inside to tell me one of the bedside lamps is on. I look in.

Lisa is curled on her side on the bed, facing the door. She's wearing one of my t-shirts, a pair of my track pants. She shifts, sighs, half-murmurs something-

She's asleep.

I breathe out. I relax. Jesus, this is all so new. I set the paring knife on the dresser and sit down quietly beside her on the bed. When I caress her cheek, she opens her eyes, looks at me muzzily.

"Hi," she says.

"Hi."

"Did you have a nice run?"

"Mm hm."

"That's good." She sits up, stretches. "Guess football really wore me out."

"You were operating on three hours of sleep. No need to apologize." I feel a pang of guilt. "I shouldn't have woken you."

"No, it's okay." She smiles for me, kisses me on the lips. She has yet to spot the knife on the dresser; I'm still trying to shake the panic I felt when I came home to a dead-quiet apartment. Being near her helps.

"Jackson, about tomorrow-" She draws back slightly, her expression becoming more serious. "What can I expect when we meet Mr. Brinkman?"

"I'm going to talk to him, Lisa."

"Is that a euphemism, Jackson? 'Talk'?"

She's being honest; so am I: "No." I look at her very directly. "Are you okay with that?"

"No violence."

"Not unless he starts something. I doubt he will."

"Okay."

She's not by any stretch of the definition socio- or psychopathic, but I know her temper, and I know her physical capabilities. Lisa can be dangerous when cornered or when she thinks herself wronged, and the man we're to meet has violated both of us.

"We're going to make him an offer," I say.

"One he can't refuse?"

"Not quite." Again I touch her cheek, gently. "One that will be in his better interest to accept."

#####

#####

#####

Later that afternoon comes visiting time with good Doctor Crane. I'm allowed another shower; I'm given a clean button-down smock and elastic-topped pants, both in a tasteful shade of under-the-bureau dust-bunny gray, and then Matron passes me off to Messrs. Tate and Mowbry, who in turn accompany me on my second trip to the administration wing. Quite graciously, my two silent primates make no mention of the scene last night. As I've told myself to do, they seem to have forgotten that other me, the thrashing, screaming, sobbing woman who had managed to convince herself that she'd ripped off her own face.

While we walk, I review my thoughts about Doctor Crane. My new working definition. I think of him as a poisonous snake that could bite at any time. I will approach him, therefore, not with quaking fear (which would label me automatically, in his reptilian mind, as potential prey) but with respect. Calm, a simplicity of motion. No sudden moves. Consequently, when Mr. Tate and Mr. Mowbry have again left us alone, behind that heavy, treacle-finished door, I am prepared to say, with the utmost civility: "I'll assume your toxin becomes less effective with each subsequent exposure, Doctor. If you gas me again, this time I will have the presence of mind to break your wrist."

_If not your neck._

"A full recovery. And so quickly, too. Splendid." Crane smiles, looking awkwardly boyish as he does. He's standing near a high narrow-framed window half-hidden by overloaded bookshelves, midway along the back wall; last night, in the dark, I didn't even notice it. I join him, and we look out through the dirty glass. There's a tiny courtyard thirty feet below us. Narrow paved walking-paths, unkempt grass shockingly green against the moss and dirt-gray of the surrounding walls.

"Would you like to get some air, Rosemary?" Crane asks.

I nod. "That would be nice."

Without calling for Messrs. Mowbry and Tate, he takes a black coat from a stand near the door and escorts me from his office. We descend stairwells with banisters of heavy black iron and worn oaken railings, pass through a labyrinth of ill-lit, yellow-walled corridors. We come to a windowless heavy door for which Crane has the key.

_Clever, this, or consistent,_ I think, as I step through the door: an exercise yard that manages to be every bit as claustrophobic as the spaces inside. We stroll the worn masonry paths under a sheet-sized square of featureless cloudy sky. The air is chilly. After about three minutes, it starts to drizzle.

I realize I might seem catlike: that is to say, like a creature that dislikes water. Not so. I learned to swim in an old quarry and in a silt-brown river near my grandparents' house. Murk, the gentle brush-by of weeds and unknown debris below the surface. At first, my brothers tried to spook me with dark water; later, I tested boyfriends the same way.

And rain. I love rain. Heavy, big-dropped, and soaking, or as thin, cold, and insidious as the spray falling now: I love it all.

I step off the path onto the tufting grass, close my eyes, turn my face upward, feel the dust-fine drops collect on my cheeks, the cusp of my upper lip, my eyelashes. Crane remains quiet. When I look at him again, he's hunching into himself, the very portrait of a sorry fellow who forgot his umbrella. The water is beading to lizard-skin on the shoulders of his black coat; it's coaxing a greasy stringiness from his hair. The lenses of his glasses are starting to mist from behind. He looks delightfully miserable, as if he's afraid he might melt and even more afraid that moving will hasten the process.

I ask, brightly: "Shall we go in?"

#####

We walk back to his office. I've seen some of the outside layout now; the hallways are becoming familiar. At his office, Crane opens the door for me.

I enter; a shiver rattles my spine. Not from anything sinister, no: however much I may have enjoyed the rain, the molder of my surroundings is simply and quickly turning me clammy. I shake water from my hair with my fingertips. "I would ask for a towel, Doctor Crane, but-"

"Oh. Of course." He leaves me just inside the door, ventures into the shadows at the nether regions of his office, behind his desk. There's a door squeezed in back there, shouldered on both sides by the room's ubiquitous bookshelves. He opens it, and the closet beyond yields up a dove-gray something. Cloth, but the murk swallows the details.

He returns to me, holds the something out. It's a dress shirt, clean and neatly pressed.

"Will this do?"

"Thank you." I take the shirt, start to unbutton my blouse. He clears his throat and glances to the side.

"You'd be a hypocrite to look away," I say quietly.

He looks back at me.

"Hold this for me, would you?" I offer him the shirt.

His hand reaches out and takes it. His eyes stay just to the right of mine as I finish unbuttoning. I shrug out of the blouse, let it drop to the hardwood floor, and stand before him. I can see the pulse in his throat. A shiver runs up his back, radiates across his narrow shoulders. Then he looks at me squarely. Not at my eyes. At me.

I hold out my hand. "Please."

Again he clears his throat. "Sorry-"

He re-passes me the dress shirt. We are, indeed, much of a size. It's good cloth, a good fit, and it's blessedly dry.

I smile as I button. "If I weren't so certain of your professional integrity, Doctor, I might think I had a chance of fucking my way out of here."

He stiffens. Above the beltline. Like someone threaded a meter of thin rebar into his spinal column and pushed.

"Or would the idea be more attractive if I were male...?" I ease closer to him, close enough for him to feel my body heat. "Not the big bruisers you find around here? A boy more your size...?"

"You'd do quite nicely, Rosemary."

"Oh, I assure you, Jonathan: there'd be nothing nice about it."

"Too bad we won't be finding out."

"Isn't it-?"

#####

I think he's going to send me back to my room, but he doesn't. He must have a hundred other patients, and he neglects them to let me talk. To analyze me, supposedly. While the last of the dismal afternoon light creeps out of his office, I answer every question he asks. He switches on his desk lamp, and we sit half-eclipsed, with the pool of illumination between us. At a lull, he reaches for the old black office phone and requests food from the depths of his private Bedlam. Steak, this time. Salad and Zinfandel and red-skinned potatoes. A smile twitches at the corners of his lips. How daring he's being, offering me red meat and alcohol. I play along, one of two intelligent, civilized, mentally balanced people about to enjoy a dinner date. I must admit the prospect of a drink provides a powerful incentive to maintain the illusion.

Again, the kitchen does not disappoint. Mr. Mowbry arrives with a polite knock, again bearing a silver tray. Crane clears a spot on a book-covered table to the right of his desk. We draw our chairs over as Mowbry sets down the tray and leaves. I meet his eyes for a moment as he goes; he seems not to recognize me.

I seat myself at the table before Crane has a chance to play at manners by drawing back my chair. I see him play at not noticing. He uncorks the wine and pours it into two clean and serviceable stemmed glasses; he seats himself; we unfold our napkins and eat. Alarm flickers for just a second in his eyes as I pick up my knife. Flickers and is gone, as quick as ball lightning. My steak is rare, tender but not breathing. Maybe the wine tastes too good. God, I needed a drink. I feel myself becoming indulgent. I relax, looking at him. Thinking of a dozen ways in which I could have him dead in under thirty seconds, before his neurotoxin could take effect. As the meal progresses, I begin to taunt him. Obliquely. I tease him, to gauge his reaction.

I want to know if he can envy the man he isn't.

#####

The first time I saw him, he was so beautiful as to seem unreal. He wasn't feminine, though. His androgyny was, as it is now, perfectly balanced. And then as now, his body was slender but wiry with muscle: I could tell, even under the well-tailored gray suit he was so uncomfortably wearing. He was unaccustomed to dresswear. A suburbs boy, then, I thought. Twenty-two, twenty-three at the most. We were much of a height. He was clean and close-shaven. His brown hair was freshly cut and combed back off his forehead. His cheekbones were high, almost too sharp, and freckled, if subtly, in a way that seemed nearly unprofessional in a murderer-for-hire. His lips were deliciously full, his wide-set eyes the purest angel's blue. I decided on the spot that I would have him in bed by tomorrow, at the latest. Just to diffuse the distraction of his beauty.

"Rosemary," said John Carter, "this is Jackson Rippner."

Carter teamed us, first, because we were new and fresh and he wanted to see not only how effective we would be in the field but whether we each could play well with others. Technically, our resumes brought us together. We were both keyed to eastern European operations. Jackson had learned Polish because of his paternal grandparents; his intelligence led him naturally to Czech, German, Romanian, and Russian. I had started with Russian at uni because first-year French was full, and then found, besides drugs and unbecoming behavior and my eventual expulsion, a silken cadence in the Slavic languages, which the company encouraged even as it allowed me to exchange my aspirations for a degree in engineering for one in calculated murder.

#####

I ask, suddenly: "Who authorized my transfer to Arkham?"

Crane replies: "I beg your pardon?"

He seems genuinely curious, as if he were that caught up in listening to me talk. I keep my voice silky and polite, but I'm in no mood for flattery, self- or otherwise.

"Perhaps I didn't speak clearly. Who authorized my transfer?"

"That's... confidential."

"Come, now, Jonathan. You've treated me to a dose of a delightful- if, I might hazard a guess, highly illegal- neurotoxin, and you've seen me naked. _Half_-naked, at least. I'd say you owe me some confidence."

"A Mr. John Case," Crane says.

I'm so certain that I'll hear the surname Carter that for a moment I _do_ hear it.

"Who is he?" I ask.

"Someone with enough power to pull levers within the legal system-"

"You've never met him."

"A signature at the bottom of a form. That's all I know."

#####

He seems sincere, so for the moment I let it go. I return to my stories. We have flan for dessert, a second glass of wine. Mr. Mowbry brings us coffee. Evening wears into night.

Finally, of Jackson, I say, truthfully: "I would have given him the world."

Crane is sitting back in his chair, cradling his coffee cup between his bony hands. "Did you ever stop to wonder if that was what he wanted?"

"You _are_ like him, Doctor Crane." I smile, slowly. "So... pedestrian. So ordinary. So petit-bourgeois."

"It would have been simple enough to ask." His voice is very quiet. Thoroughly reasonable. He's just managed to silence his anger a little too effectively.

I pretend not to have noticed. "Everyone wants the world, Jonathan. Some people are just loath to admit it."

He looks at me for a long moment, not speaking. In his pale eyes I see the first cold glitter of jealousy.

Now I know how I'm going to get out of here.

#####

#####

#####


	4. Chapter 4

Other than my self-generated paranoiac scare when I got back from my run, our evening in Chicago is uneventful. Among the freezer items the grocery service left are a package of chicken with vegetables and a package of vegetarian lasagna; Lisa and I split both of them. Over dinner, I pass on to her the final details from Paul, what we can expect tomorrow in Toronto. Lisa listens quietly. She's present; she's eating; she's sipping a glass of water. But behind her gray eyes, she's multi-tasking.

"You've got your customer-service face on," I say.

She smiles. "Sorry."

"Are you afraid? About tomorrow?"

"No." She looks at me honestly. "It's just that it's not often you get a chance to confront someone who nearly got you killed."

I take a drink of water. "Present company excepted-?"

"No- _Yes_. I mean-" She pauses. We watch one another across the kitchen table. Our silence is shared but not awkward. Not harrying or accusing. Finally, she laughs softly. "I'm sorry: I'm not quite sure what the correct response is-"

"I nearly got you killed once."

Her eyes grow serious; her expression remains open and gentle. "That's what you _did_, Jackson. It was part of your job. It's not who you _are_."

"Are you sure of that, angel?"

"One hundred percent."

I lean across the table; I kiss her on the lips. She rises, too. She cups her right hand against the back of my head, tangles her fingers in my hair. She closes her eyes as she kisses me back.

I had been thinking we were in for a quiet evening. Dozing on the sofa, maybe to _Lost Horizon_. Often best, the night before a job, just to relax. Along with the dinners, the grocery service left a brick of Neapolitan in the freezer, and I would have been willing to give Lisa first crack at the strawberry.

Maybe later. If we get back from Shangri-La.

#####

#####

#####

Darkness falls at Arkham. Redundant, I know. We share a silver pot of coffee and oat cakes with boysenberry jam, delivered, as always, by the gloriously simian Mr. Mowbry, and then, very politely, Doctor Crane wishes me a good night. It's just past ten.

"I would ask you to stay and chat longer, Rosemary," he says, "but I really must get some writing done. You do understand, don't you?"

"I'd hate to think myself guilty of stifling your creative muse."

"I doubt you've ever thought yourself guilty of anything."

"No need to doubt, Jonathan." I concede the point with a placid smile. _You arrogant little prick_. "Might I ask to borrow a book? Something to keep me company...?"

He rises from his desk chair, and he turns his back on me as he goes to the nearest bookshelf. Obviously he believes the musty tweed between his winglike scapulae would prove an adequate defense against the blade of the jam knife. He peers through and above his pricey glasses; he lets his fingertips play along the spines; he selects. He returns to me where I'm seated near his desk and offers me a hardback copy of William Faulkner's _Light in August_. It's old. The dust jacket is missing; the cover is coarse and black.

"There's mutilation," he says, as if that were all the recommendation anyone might need.

I rise as I accept the book. "Might I assume it ends badly, then?"

He replies, with a thin smile, "Might I ask that you don't slit your wrists with the end-papers?"

"Of course. Thank you for a lovely afternoon and evening, Jonathan."

Mowbry brings Tate when he comes for me. In a way, I'm flattered. I rate more of an escort than an empty coffee pot and a silver tray.

#####

#####

#####

Several hours later, I'm feeling dreamy. Pleasantly exhausted. I'm flat on my back, nude. Lisa is naked, too. She's lying at an angle, resting her head against my midriff. A few minutes ago, she covered us, piecemeal, with the bed's flat sheet and the blanket. Getting chilly once the romp ended and the sweat started to dry. We're cozy now. Content. Our bodies seem tuned to finding comfort relative to one other, no matter our positions. I don't believe in destiny, and the concept of soulmates is bullshit, but as far as post-coital cuddling goes, we've got it made.

I say to the ceiling: "We have to tell your dad."

"Mm-" Lisa nuzzles my diaphragm. "That I'm cutting work to go to Toronto?"

"No. About- you know. Us."

"Oh, right."

"Think he'll be okay with it?" It hits me, suddenly, though without pain, irritation, or alarm: I've asked her to marry me, and she's said "yes." We're no longer _on intimate terms_: we're _engaged_. And it's not just Joe Reisert who needs to know: we'll have to tell Lisa's mom- another thing occurs to me: I've never even met her mom- and my mom, too. Somehow, though, Joe's the one who really seems to matter. I'm starting to like the craggy old bastard.

While I'm mentally updating our social status, Lisa is having herself a thoughtful pause. I feel it in the depth of her breathing: she's drifting a bit. Her voice is sleepy. "Maybe you should let him beat you at golf."

"He already _does_ beat me at golf. Viciously. Last time, he called me a pussy."

"You've been golfing with my dad?"

"Yes. Twice. He didn't tell you-?"

"No. Jackson, why-"

"I thought I might try to make a better impression on him."

"That's so sweet. Really."

I find myself smiling in the dark as my cheeks go warm. "What can I say-? I'm old-fashioned."

Lisa laughs softly. I feel as much as hear her: her breath brushes my skin. "Did he really call you a pussy?"

"Mm hm. If he wanted to beat me any harder, he'd have to use a club."

"Maybe that's what has to happen, then."

"What-? He gets to beat me with a golf club so I can marry you?"

"Uh huh."

"I'm drawing the line at a five-iron. And no shots to the head."

"That's okay, baby; Dad's a reasonable guy." Lisa's voice is a fading murmur. She's past the last mile marker on the road to dreamland. "I'm sure he'll agree."

I think, again, of asking the question, the one we managed to bypass at dinner- _What did you and Claire talk about today?,_ but I have to learn to be patient. I trust her. If she has something to tell me, she will. Moreover, and more immediately, what Lisa has is contagious. With her relaxed beside me, I'm following her lead: I'm lapsing into a doze. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow. Questions can wait. I listen to her breathing, deep and slow; I close my eyes; I sleep.

#####

Our team in Toronto has tagged info-whiz Brinkman. They've bugged the room he's to stay in at the Strathcona, down in the financial district; one particularly cheeky young newb, standing in as crowd-dressing with a rucksack, old jeans, and a sweatshirt at Pearson, was nimble enough to tap a micro-dot tracker-mike onto the back of his jacket just beyond customs. The feeds are good. Paul's ear-team can hear everything Andy is doing, and Paul will be phoning me with updates.

We depart O'Hare at ten o' eight, aboard a fifty-seater Embraer ERJ-145. When we board, Lisa for a second stops dead, looking down the narrow tube of the fuselage. I watch the color leave her face as we side-step down the aisle to our seats. I hoist our carryons into the overhead; I wedge myself in next to the window. Lisa sits down next to me. The buckle for her seatbelt has gotten jammed down between the seats. She tugs it loose. I can see her hands shaking as she belts herself in.

"Are you going to be okay?" I ask.

"This isn't a plane, Jackson. It's a _bus_." She keeps her voice low. "A fucking bus with wings."

Paul could have had us in a seventy-seater CR-7 at eight-thirty. "I'll make sure we're on something bigger on the way back."

"Good." She looks down and away; she frowns. "I'm sorry to be such a baby." A dry chuckle. "Some secret agent I'd make."

"It's always okay to be scared. As long as you're aware of your fear. As long as it doesn't define you or control your actions." I kiss her forehead. "Fear can be a very useful thing."

"Thank you." She lingers for a moment against my lips. Still something she isn't telling me, something she's not ready to discuss. As we ease away from the terminal, she settles back into her seat. "Is it too early to start drinking?"

"Not where we're going." I smile, drolly. "For that matter, not where we're coming from, either."

#####

Toronto is almost apologetically overcast. Strikes me as typically Canadian. Like the clouds can't get their act together to make way for the sun. We land at Pearson at a quarter to one, Lisa's new passport is every bit as magical as Paul told her it would be, and by one-fifteen we're on the 427 heading in to town in a rented black 335xi. My one foible, I guess you'd call it, my one demand: if there's a BMW available for ground transport, I want it. Saving the company a few bucks via Toyota or the Big Three doesn't mean shit to me. Keep the damn Dodge or Chevy in the barn where it belongs. I want the Beemer.

Lisa's never been to Toronto. I find myself thinking that we might come for a leisure visit some day. I think she'd like it. Not as hot and bright as Miami, certainly, but not as harsh as Chicago can be, despite being farther north. Lake Ontario tends to keep the place mellow. On the Gardiner Expressway, I see her reading the yew-bush billboards planted on the embankments. All those company names carved out in velvety green.

Andy Brinkman works for one of them.

#####

Paul has us booked at the Fairmont Royal York. Smart move on his part: not only does it put us within two blocks of the Strathcona, but the old-fashioned luxury of the place should at least partly make up for the bus with wings. The plan is for us to ruffle Andy's feathers, tail him a bit if necessary, and then catch a flight home tomorrow. We might not be here for fun, but we're not here to kill anyone, either. The Toronto team will continue to monitor him until he heads home; once he reaches England, our U.K. team will take over at Heathrow.

We unwind for a few minutes in the room. I lie on my back on the queen-size bed, do some deep breathing, let the kinks work out of my spine. Lisa has a look at the view of Union Station, the Expressway, the hazy blue crescent of Lake Ontario beyond. She indulges in a bit of functional preening. Touchups to her hair and makeup, a smoothing of wrinkles from her clothes. She's wearing a pin-striped charcoal-gray pantsuit over a white blouse; she has her hair in a loose bun. Her shoes are black slip-ons with low heels: sharp, but as she explained it, she could do a seven-minute mile in them without raising a blister or losing her footing. Julie Weber, the chief of security back at the Lux, turned her on to the brand.

I get up, check my messages. According to Paul's people, Andrew Brinkman is in a meeting at his corporation's HQ over on Bay Street; he's due to be out at three. It's two-fifteen right now. Time to head for the Strathcona. I put away my phone, drift closer to the open bathroom door. "Did I ever tell you that I find sensible women incredibly sexy?"

Lisa, leaning slightly over the marble vanity-top, is putting on the second of a pair of simple diamond-stud earrings. She winks at me in the mirror. "I'll be sure to let Julie know."

#####

We look like an ordinary business team. I'm wearing a dark blue suit, a white dress shirt, a silk tie in shades of gray. Like Lisa, I'm carrying a shoulder-strap briefcase. In the pub at the Strathcona, we find a table away from the big-screen TVs. I order a Red Cap; Lisa orders Perrier. We split an order of fries. I check my watch, glance toward the entrance. The two of us might be waiting for a colleague to join us, maybe find a quieter place for lunch.

In my breast pocket, my phone vibrates. Lisa keeps her attention casually on the pub's entrance as I answer. "Yeah."

_He just came in,_ says our girl in the lobby. _He's heading up to his room_.

"Number?"

_Five-twenty-six._

"Thanks." I take a last fry as I get up. Lisa stands, slips the strap of her briefcase over her shoulder. She looks to me.

"We're on," I tell her.

#####

We're outside the door to 526. We're alone in the hall. I stand to the right of the peephole; Lisa stands to the left. I put my ear to the door and listen.

Water running. The shower. Makes sense. If Brinkman went straight in to a block of meetings on Bay Street after getting off the plane from the U.K., he probably feels- mentally and physically- like the floor of a movie theater.

I motion Lisa to stay to the side; I use my master-key on the lock. I open the door slowly. Not that I'm expecting an ambush, but walking the love of my life into gunplay on her first field job would hardly be conducive to the health of our relationship. There's no entryway. I look ahead, into the room. No one moving. The TV is off. A Toshiba laptop, its power cord plugged in to a block converter, its screen slumbering to Etch-a-Sketch whorls, is open on the work desk. A soft-sider carryon is splayed on the bed.

I step inside, check behind the door. I motion Lisa past me and quietly shut the door. The shower is still running. Now I can hear Andy, through the muffling of the bathroom door and the hiss of the water, humming to himself. I don't recognize the tune, but whatever it is, he's off-pitch. I smile to myself; I relax. I straighten the lapels of my suit jacket and gesture toward the room's upholstered guest-chair. Lisa takes the cue, has a seat, sits back. I don't have to tell her; she seems to know: if Andy knew someone was listening, he'd be trying to get within a thousand tonal yards of the key.

I position myself to the right of the bathroom door. We wait. Three minutes later, give or take, the water shuts off. Andrew Brinkman exits the bathroom. He's dripping wet, and he's wearing a white terrycloth robe. Standard semi-luxury-hotel issue. He doesn't have it belted. He walks right past me, makes a beeline for the bed. He actually has his right hand on the jumble of clothes in his carryon before he sees Lisa.

"Jesus Christ-" He starts. His bare feet nearly leave the maple-laminate floor. "Who the fuck are you?"

Lisa cocks her head. She smiles a very cool version of her customer-service smile and has a casual look- a very brief casual look, you might say- at the view afforded by Andy's open robe.

"We're here to make sure you don't steal the towels," she says.

He pulls the robe shut, fumbles with the belt. "Who-"

"I'm Jackson Rippner, Andy," I say, from behind him. He starts again. Like the words were taconite pellets hitting him in the back. I smirk. "And the beautiful woman to whom you just revealed your shortcomings is Lisa Reisert."

He turns on me. "What do you want?"

"Do you know who we are, Andy?"

Brinkman shivers. And not just from the fact that he's in need of a towel. "Yes."

"Good. I always like to put faces to my fuckees, don't you?"

"What do you-"

"What we want, Andy, is to know who hired you to screw with our phones and our e-mail six weeks ago."

"I don't-"

I ask, bluntly: "Was it Rosemary Wheeler?"

Water drips from his bowl-cut hair as he shakes his head. "No."

I frown. I've been told my eyes can be chilling. Frankly, I think that's a load of crap. They were my dad's eyes, and they're my sister Milla's eyes, too, and Dad and Milla are two of the warmest, best people I'm ever likely to know. Which doesn't prevent me from staring at Andy now, and feeling a twisted sense of pleasure when he looks into my eyes, flinches, and looks away.

He focuses on Lisa, half-tries for a cocky smile. "Is she the muscle?"

"Why don't you make me mad and find out?" Lisa counters, dryly.

"Stuffy in here, isn't it?" I say. "Lisa, would you mind turning up the air conditioning?"

"Sure."

A tendon twitches in Andy's right cheek as Lisa gets up and crosses to the wall thermostat. He's wearing a heavy terry robe, a good hotel robe, but the cloth is absorbing more water by the second. If he's chilly now, he's about to get chillier. I'm not here to torture him, but no one said anything about not making the little fucker uncomfortable.

"Can I offer you a drink?" Brinkman asks. He's asking because he needs one. I see it in the nervous bunching of his shoulders.

"Kind of you, Andy," I say.

He goes to the mini bar, cracks the rings of cap-tops, pours Crown Royal from two tiny bottles into three tumblers.

"What happens now?" He offers me a glass, and I take it. "I end up in a tub full of icewater with my throat cut?"

"That isn't how this works, Andy. Tell us who hired you, and you've got a good career, a good salary."

He wets his upper lip with liquor. "And protection?"

"Yes."

"I like the career I have, thanks." He tips back his head as he drinks. For just a second, I have to fight an urge to punch him in the larynx. "Let's hear option two."

"You don't tell us who hired you, and we watch and listen and generally make things uncomfortable."

"Bruise my credit rating, things like that?"

"Maybe accidentally close your bank accounts, cancel your passport, sure."

"Can I have a day to think about it?"

"Twenty-four hours: all yours."

I drink my whiskey and put the empty glass on the work desk. Lisa puts her glass next to mine. She leaves her shot untouched; she looks to Brinkman as if to say _You need this more than I do_. We leave. In the elevator, I feel her eyes on me. A silent _That's it?_

When we reach the lobby, the Strathcona's security team isn't waiting. A Toronto police cruiser isn't pulling up as we step outside. Brinkman is being a good boy and mulling his options. I keep us at a comfortable stroll as we head back to the Fairmont.

"Andy's been caught doing something very dirty," I say. "We've responded with a very lucrative job offer wrapped around a polite bit of blackmail. I'd say he's getting a fair deal. Unless you think it's _too_ fair...?"

"I'd be lying if I said I didn't harbor violent thoughts toward him."

"That means you're honest, Lisa."

"Not evil?"

"Not at all."

"So what happens now?"

"His room is bugged. Our eyes and ears at the Strathcona monitor him until he leaves Toronto tomorrow. If he does anything of interest, we'll be informed." I stop walking. I stand before Lisa on the wide gray sidewalk and look north and south on York, between the Torontonian blend of skyscrapers and buildings very old and very new. It's still overcast, but the sun has warmed any threat of rain from the clouds. It's a pleasant May day. I offer Lisa a smile. "So- the rest of the afternoon is ours. What's your pleasure, Miss Reisert?"

She relaxes; she smiles back. "You can buy me dinner."

"After I let you steal my packet of Rocket Chips on the plane...? How can you still be hungry?"

Lisa swats my arm. "And it better be good, Mr. Rippner."

She walks away. I smirk; I follow.

#####

#####

#####

A day in the life of Arkham. A dull day. Dull, damnably dull. I read my Faulkner. I do pushups, lunges, and crunches in my cell. At twelve-thirty, just before lunch, Matron takes me off for a physical. Doctor Jarvis Breen looks like a nerdier Peter Lorre in a cut-rate remake of _Mad Love_. He declares me perfectly healthy. Physically, at any rate. He backsnorts a laugh as he tells me that he leaves the mental details to good Doctor Crane. From whom I hear nothing, all through the salt-and-water chicken-soup travesty of lunch and the rest of the long, gray, dull day. Finally, at six, right as I'm wondering what horrors of mediocrity await at dinner, Matron returns.

"Doctor Crane will see you now," she says.

By blessed coincidence, I join him just in time for supper. Canadian walleye fillets almondine, asparagus, a suitably non-whimsical Riesling. Lemon sorbet for dessert. We eat; we don't talk. When we've finished, and Mr. Mowbry has cleared away the dishes and the silver tray, Doctor Crane sits back in his chair. I find myself sitting, not uncomfortably, at the edge of mine, like a girl at a music lesson.

Crane picks up his Montblanc, taps the capped tip on his lower lip. "So, Rosemary, you were saying," he says, finally, "everyone wants the world."

"Mm hm."

"Even Mr. Rippner."

"He falls in the category, doesn't he? 'Everyone'?"

I returned his copy of _Light in August_ when I arrived tonight. He didn't re-shelve it. It's lying on the desk, near his right elbow. "Didn't you enjoy the book, Rosemary?"

"Bill Faulkner was a boozing, misogynistic asshole."

"Which doesn't answer my question."

"I enjoyed the book, Jonathan."

"What did you enjoy most?"

"Do you want me to say the mutilation? Because I did: I enjoyed that." I lean back in my chair now, too. "I enjoyed the love story more. Not because it was a love story per se- I'm not a fan of romance as such- but because-"

"-because-?"

"Because it ended badly."

"Do you think they got what they deserved?"

"There's no such thing as 'deserving,' Jonathan. It ended badly; I enjoyed that. That's all."

"So... if Mr. Rippner were to get the world, it wouldn't be because he deserved it?"

"Mm." I draw up my right leg, balance my heel on the edge of my chair, wrap my arms around my shin. "He would obsess over his knives."

"What's that, Rosemary-?"

"He thought guns were for cowards," I say. "He would never carry a gun."

"Why is that?"

"His father was murdered by kids with guns. They shot him in the head during a robbery. Took off half his skull."

"And so Mr. Rippner manifests his bravery in the form of a blade. Phallic, don't you think?"

"The thrust, the spurt of blood? Absolutely. I think the breaking point came when- Do we have time for petty complaints?"

"Certainly."

"The breaking point came the night he asked, 'What do you think the history of serration is?'"

"Were you in an- umm- intimate position at the time?"

"I was giving him- Yes, Doctor," I purr, "you might say the position was intimate."

He looks at me for a long moment. Then he taps his pen, once, on his lower teeth and sits forward. "We're wasting our time here."

I release my leg. My spine goes straight. "We're done-?"

"Yes and no." He stands. He doesn't reach for the phone. No call to Messrs. Tate and Mowbry. "Come with me, Rosemary."

He offers me his hand. I don't take it. "Where?"

"Come with me."

He goes to the door of his office, opens it, looks back at me. I get up and follow him.

#####

He leads me back through the hospital. Away from the sounds of the institution, the voices. The shouts, the moans, the screams. We walk, not speaking, into a realm of silence. Then, softly, comes the sound of dripping. Ahead, I hear the wind. We pass the last working light fixture, and Doctor Crane keeps going. We walk past a broken window, one and then another. Rain blows in through the glassless, warping frames.

He takes a flashlight from his jacket pocket. In the weak glare of the bulb, I catch glimpses of wall, mold a spongy gray against the institutional green. The tile floor is wet, shiny black. My slip-ons brush past debris, bits of paper, sodden leaves.

Crane turns to the right, into a windowless hall. The rain doesn't reach this far; the floor underfoot is dry, the walls less wracked with mold. He stops at a door, fishes a keyring from his trousers pocket. An old brass key, long-stemmed. He opens the door, reaches in. I hear the click of a light switch.

He turns to me. "After you."

I'm expecting- What? A shock-treatment room? A steel medical table, thick leather straps, trays of barbaric metal instruments? I'm not expecting an apartment. That's what it is.

It's like something from the Thirties. Something Lisa Reisert would see in one of her precious ancient movies. One room. A cramped dining area, a wooden table and chairs, an old refrigerator, white cupboards, a glass coffee percolator perched on one of the cold burners of a two-burner gas stove. A mohair sofa ahead, a brass stand-lamp, a worn braided rug underfoot. Pictures on the walls. Tiny watercolor landscapes, framed and cracking photographs in black and white. Faded roses on the dirty cream wallpaper. A door opening into a pocket-sized bathroom. A glimpse of an old porcelain washbasin beyond.

And, to the right, a metal-frame double bed. Two thin pillows side by side under a grayish-white knit spread.

I ask, as I step inside, "Do you live here?"

"Sometime."

He follows me in; he shuts the door. He doesn't lock it. He puts away the flashlight and the keyring and comes to stand beside me on the braided rug.

"Would you do something for me, Rosemary?"

"What, Jonathan?"

He doesn't look at me. His head turns toward the bed, but he doesn't look at it, either. "Would you get undressed, please?"

#####

#####

#####

Lisa and I have dinner at the 5th Elementt. Dill pesto-crusted tilapia for me, a very good malai kofta for her, and a glass of local dry Riesling apiece, after which we leave the BMW parked and window-shop on Bloor. If something happens with Andrew Brinkman, Paul's eye-team has only to call me. As it is, we're back at our hotel fairly early. We both check our messages; we brush our teeth, wash our faces. Lisa slips into a t-shirt and a pair of lounging pants and takes the side of the bed nearer the window.

She lies back, stretches her legs. "You didn't finish that last story."

I ask as I hang my suit jacket: "Which one, babe?"

"You told me when you stopped working with Rosemary. When did you stop seeing her?"

She watches me undress. I don't mind. I find comfort in the calm possession of her eyes. I come to bed wearing my boxers and my scars. How she's read me: the talismans, the marks, a violent history written on my body. When my hesitation persists, she guides me with her hands, draws me on to my right side. She touches my lower back on the left, traces with light warm fingertips a scar I can't quite see. Short and straight, the width of a fighter blade. It took only a few stitches to close. The wound it commemorates nearly killed me.

"This," she says. "She gave you this, didn't she?"

A bad joke I don't make: _I tried to put that one behind me. _I was stabbed in the back. Literally. If there could be a more perfect mark of betrayal, I can't imagine what it might be.

"Yes-"

I prop myself on my elbow, look at her. There's so much patience in her, so much love, so freely given. I won't talk of deserving or not deserving. It's not a contest. She's not challenging me to love her as much as she loves me. I'm honored by her love: that's all. I can only hope to honor her in turn.

"You might say our last night together wasn't our best," I tell her.

#####

#####

#####

We become what we need to become, Jackson and I. We aren't acting. We must convince not our marks but ourselves. As terrorists, businesspeople, killers, assassins.

Or lovers.

A mark is never more vulnerable than at the moment of the great reveal. No matter the indignation, the anger. If only for a second, the shock is immobilizing. Under cover of hesitation, at the moment of total emotional eclipse, we strike.

Never mind your neurotoxin, Jonathan. Betrayal is the most perfect poison.

I wish I could be there when Jackson reveals himself to Lisa Reisert. When she sees for that last, fatal moment what he really is.

#####

I do as Doctor Crane asks. I undress. Then I draw back the grayish bedspread and the worn white flat sheet beneath and lie down. He has yet to look at me. I watch him move about his doll's-house apartment as he undresses in turn, and I know what he needs me to be. Cunning but desperate. Intelligent but weak. Vulnerable enough to tempt the titan's ego trapped inside that sickly body. Vulnerable enough to tempt the body itself.

Nude, he looks like Jackson must have looked at, say, nineteen. Or Jackson if Jackson had been dead at nineteen. Pale and awkward. His body displays more bone than muscle. He's not emaciated, but he's underfed nonetheless. His skin is less youthful than preserved-looking. He seems like a young Jackson killed, if carefully so, with minimal violence, and sent to a semi-incompetent taxidermist. I half expect his scent to carry the tang of formaldehyde. He drifts around the room, folding and hanging his clothes, completely un-self-conscious, a third-party detachment to his movements, as if he's performing a ritual. It strikes me, in the grayish-white pallor of his skin, the quiet care with which he straightens his drab clothing, that he's like a mortician about to prep a body for burial. And that body is his.

He slips a wooden hanger into the shoulders of his shirt, buttons the top two buttons, and hangs hanger and shirt on the frame of the closet door. He comes to the bed, and I lie back, looking up at him. I'm curious. I want to see what he intends to do.

He takes off his glasses, folds them carefully, lays them on the nightstand. He leans down, his face above mine. He doesn't close his eyes. Neither do I. He brings his mouth within an eighth of an inch of mine. I can feel his breath on my lips.

Then he moves lower and closer, past my chin and jaw. At the pulse-point of my left-side carotid, he pauses. Again I feel his breath, but not his lips. He doesn't touch me. He moves lower, past my collarbone, my sternum.

He moves his head to the left and bites down hard on my left breast.

The pain is intense, shocking. I don't scream, but the air yelps from my lungs. He doesn't let go. His teeth lock on my flesh.

I hit him, my right fist to his left temple. I hit him again before he can react. Knuckles to cheekbone, as hard as I can. I feel my skin tear as his teeth unlock. I take him by the shoulders and throw him to the side. I follow. I pin and straddle him on the mattress, and I hit him again. Blood spurts from his lower lip.

He's either stunned or simply not struggling. I can't tell, and I don't care. I grip him by the larynx and say, "If you move, I'll break your neck."

He lies beneath me, panting, his mouth bleeding. His arms are spread straight to the sides. He looks up at me with those pale dead eyes and croaks, bloodily, "Yes."

This is what he wants. This is what he fears. I see a vein snaking in chalky blue beneath the pallor of the skin on his left pectoral. A river as seen from high up, through thin clouds. I lean over him so he can feel my breath on his skin, above the vein. His heart, if he has one, is three inches beneath my face.

"Turnabout is foreplay, isn't it, Jonathan-?" I murmur.

I bite his chest savagely, and Doctor Crane cries out.

People are apt to think of me as a selfish bitch. But I can be generous. I know what Jonathan Crane wants, and I give it to him. This will be the very worst, or the very best, night of his life. Yes, the sex is rough. No, I don't care to provide the details.

And all the while I'm thinking of the man he isn't. I'm thinking of the night we bled, the two of us.

Jackson and I.

#####

#####

#####

It's six months after our last job, and on a night late in May, Rosemary rings the bell.

I let her in. She's the wrong one, and deep down I know it. I let her in anyway. I ask her how her therapy is going; she responds openly: things are going well. I ask her how she's been keeping: "Busy," she says. She's finishing her degree; her dad helped her find a place in an engineering firm, and she's aiding with computer-based design to pay the bills. She's not ecstatic about her life, but she doesn't seem edgy or resentful. For the first time since I've known her, she seems content.

Genuinely balanced.

#####

#####

#####

I ring the bell, and Jackson lets me in. Maybe he's honestly interested in how I've been. Maybe he's curious, wondering what I've come for. Or maybe we both need to play-act what we're not, that is to say _normal human beings_.

We go through the motions of catching up. We read through the script, the _How-have-you-been?-Fine,_ all the rest. We act like a couple on an evening in. He boils pasta; I make an odds-and-ends tomato sauce from things I find in his cupboards, in the refrigerator. We eat at the kitchen table, and then we finish a bottle of very decent Zinfandel in the semi-dark of the living area, each lounging at a corner of his L-sofa. He puts down his glass one-third-full and comes nearer. When he moves in to kiss me, I don't pull away. I kiss him back. He tastes pleasantly of Zin. In that moment, as I part my lips for him, I know, from the unabashed tenderness in his touch, the imminence of sex notwithstanding, what Jackson Rippner wants: to lie beside someone, if only just once, in absolute trust.

_Sorry, Jack._

He has his eyes closed. I close mine, too. His breath catches as our tongues touch- a sound of purest longing growling softly from deep in his throat- and I don't have to look at him to know I have him.

One kiss. Just one, willingly given. That's all it takes.

#####

#####

#####

I wake up alone. It's six minutes past three. Light is entering the bedroom, dimly, from down in the apartment. I get up, pull on my boxers. I take a lockback S.O.G. from the cabinet in the closet and go downstairs.

Rosemary is dressed; she's at my computer. I come closer. I know she can see me in her peripherals, or sense me in the dark; I know that, for the moment, she's choosing to ignore me.

"You should have gone with your instincts, Rose," I say. For just a second, a tiny part of me wants to believe that she did. That she came to bed with me willingly, that the passion in her kisses was real.

She speaks without looking away from the glowing monitor: "And drugged you, you mean." She has a gum-stick-sized hack drive plugged into one of the Mac's USB ports. "Actually, I was just leaving, Jack."

"So I see. Taking what you think you have coming...?" My bank account numbers. My passwords, buried deep but retrievable on the hard drive. All that, plus data the company considers sensitive. Highly salable, highly lucrative for, say, a disgruntled ex-agent hoping to make a little extra cash.

"Afraid so."

I reach for the drive. As I do, I get myself between her and the computer, and she stabs me. She does it just like that, like a viper, as she straightens away from the desk. The blade sinks at least four inches into my lower back before she pulls it free again; the pain is instantaneous and excruciating. She grabs for the drive, but my hand is already on it. It yanks loose and spirals out of my fingers; I hear it clatter against something in the dark. I flick open and swing the knife I brought down from the bedroom. Shock strips my concentration and my accuracy, and Rosemary easily avoids the shot. Which doesn't prevent me catching the wrist of her knife hand and twisting it. She goes with the twist, wrenching her tendons but avoiding a snapped bone, and her knife thunks to the carpet. She punches the heel of her free hand into my chin. That, combined with the agony in my back, wins her her freedom.

She takes a step back, panting. I'm wounded but armed; she's unarmed, and she no longer has a clear chance of getting what she came for. She turns to run. The room is starting to tip. I lurch after her, check my hip against the corner of the desk, and stumble to my knees. As I do, I bury the serrated blade of the S.O.G. all the way to the guard in the back of her right thigh and shove upward.

She shrieks, and that's enough. Enough to focus my bloodlust, if nothing else. I paw her knife off the floor and rush her. She's staggering for the door with the blade of my knife still buried in her leg. She looks over her shoulder at me. Pain- no: _pure terror_ in her eyes.

My lips pull back in a rictus grin. Seems I _can_ make her feel something. My breath hisses between my teeth. I can taste blood. Mine. Soon hers, too-

She's into the kitchen; she tips a chair into my path. Wounded, I'm uncoordinated. I try to sidestep, and I trip. The kitchen counter rises up and collides with my jaw.  
Blackness seeps as thick as crude oil up behind my eyes. As my head hits the kitchen floor, I hear the door slam.

#####

"Who found you, Jackson?" Lisa asks.

I start. It's like jolting awake from a nightmare. Talking about it has made the memory of bleeding out there in the kitchen sickeningly fresh. I feel a sudden urge to lie. _The cleaning service,_ I might say. Or _I managed to reach the phone._ Only I didn't reach the phone- if not for lack of trying. I regained consciousness long enough to drag myself from the kitchen floor, only to collapse again, for once and all, leaving what would be a bloodstain the size of a large pizza on the living room carpet.

"Claire did."

"How did she know-?"

"She told me later that she got an anonymous call. A tip from a number she didn't recognize. She said it had to have been Rosemary, but we never-"

On the night stand, my phone buzzes. It's Paul, calling with an update. Brinkman has left his room only once, to have dinner at a local steakhouse. He ate alone. He's placed no calls, either from the room phone or from his cell. His flight for London leaves at eight-fifty-five. I'm impatient for Miller to finish. This is newsfeed stuff, nothing actionable. If Brinkman was going to try anything sinister in Toronto, he would have done so by now, and the look on Lisa's face is sending chills through me.

When I shut my phone, she says: "Claire wants to give us a wedding present."

Her expression is very strange. Too controlled. She looks pale.

I skip the jokes about supernumerary toasters. "Lisa, what's wrong?"

She looks in my eyes. "Jackson, who runs the company?"

"John does. Claire helps him."

"Wrong."

"Then who-"

"It's Claire's company, Jackson. John is her front. Her right-hand man."

She's trembling. Almost unconsciously, I reach out, slip my arm across her waist. She shifts closer to me.

"It's hers," she says quietly. "Yesterday, she said it'll be mine. Someday. If I want it."

I'm stunned. For a second, the world and everything in it, my pulse and blood included, seems to go absolutely still.

"Lisa," I say, softly, "why didn't you tell me sooner?"

"I didn't want it weighing on both of us when we had a job to do. In case Toronto turned out to be dangerous." Tears fill her eyes. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay. Baby, it's okay." I rest my hand against her cheek, feel her trembling. "I would have done the same thing."

_All this will be ours._ Rosemary used to say that. Half-murderously, half in fun. Standing on a balcony, looking out a window, oftentimes drink in hand, in whatever hotel in whatever city we might happen to be. After hours, after we'd finished a job, with the lights spread out before us pricking the dark urban landscape like stars in an inverted night sky.

And once, just once, at a party at the Carters'.

I'm glad Lisa is beside me. Reality has just destabilized, and I'm feeling a little unsteady. "Do you want it?"

"I don't know. It's not just me wanting it or not, Jackson: it's us." She wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. She looks uncertain, but not afraid. "We have a lot to talk about, don't we-?"

#####

#####

#####

I sit up; I rise. I leave the old metal-frame bed and Doctor Crane. For a moment I stand and look at him. The braided rug doesn't reach this far, and the hardwood floor is cold under my bare feet. Jonathan is lying with his head tipped back on his pillow. His eyes are closed; his arms are loose at his sides. As if he's floating there in the bloodstained sheets.

I can't tell if he's unconscious, asleep, or dead.

No matter. There's work to be done. I enter the bathroom. Mounted to the wall above the porcelain basin is a medicine cabinet. Inside, I find an old bottle of aspirin, tooth floss, a toothbrush, tooth powder in a screw-top tin. Powdered shaving soap, a boar's-hair shaving brush, a small black crockery bowl.

And a straight razor with a mother-of-pearl handle.

I could search for scissors. I tell myself that that would be a waste of time, but, more truthfully, as I pick up the razor and unfold it, the heft feels just right in my hand.

I look back toward the bed. He hasn't moved. His head is still back, his Adam's apple a gristly knot pointed at the cracked ceiling, and his throat-

- yes, now, with the light just so, and me standing very still, I see the movement, the slow tympanic throb, at his pulse points.

The razor feels _just right_. I imagine the hairline pressure of the sharpened edge against his throat. I hear in my mind the gritty soft hiss as his skin rips. I feel the shocking warmth of his spraying blood-

I smile.

I check my reflection in the mirror that fronts the medicine cabinet. My face is ghostly in the cloudy glass. My pale eyes stare out from dark sockets. I look at myself, and I start to cut my hair.

#####

I put on his clothes. I button his dress shirt with quick, steady fingers, tie his tie in a perfect Windsor knot at my throat, draw his belt but one notch smaller around my waist. I lace his shoes tightly over his socks on my feet. I cross quietly to the night stand and pocket his expensive eyeglasses. His lens prescription, thankfully, isn't terribly radical: though I'll wait to don the glasses, I'll be able to move confidently with them on.

Before the bathroom mirror, I push my fingers up and back through my freshly cut hair. A gesture he made the day we came in from the rain, shifting his wet bangs further back off his forehead. I run the cold tap over the comb I found in his back trousers pocket and smooth the back and sides of my head. I wish I had time for a shower, but it's better that I carry his scent.

I look in the mirror, and I see the man he isn't.

I leave Jonathan Crane in his cold bed. I quietly close the door of his apartment, take the flashlight from his jacket pocket, and make my way back through the ruined corridors of Arkham. I detour to his office only to fetch his coat. He wasn't wearing his neurotoxin apparatus, and I haven't the time to search for it now. In the right-hand pocket of the coat, I find on a ring below an old leather fob the keys to a house lock and a Jaguar.

I descend to ground level, slip on Crane's expensive eyewear, and saunter through Arkham's moldering entrance hall. Half the battle is knowing your mark's stride and executing that stride with impudence. "Goodnight, Doctor Crane," says the blue-uniformed thug at the front desk. I smile, as if at a private joke- sweet Jonathan's smug-bastard smile; I nod. Right as I pass the guard, I angle my head down and away, as I pat my coat pockets for the car keys already in my right hand.

Out the front entrance of Arkham I go, through the brass-framed doors, their glass panes dirty, thick, and spattered with rain, into the wet and windy night.

#####

#####

#####

The next day, Lisa is back at the Lux. Not that she wants to go- I can see it in her: she wants to be out of the public eye, somewhere quiet, where she and I can think and the two of us can continue to talk things through- but Dave has proved less of a miracle man than she first thought. Something came up with his family back east, and he's requested a few days off.  
We'll meet at my place when she gets off work. Besides checking in with Paul Miller regarding Andrew Brinkman, I've got an errand of my own today. I'm going to have a chat with Rosemary.

#####

I make the drive to Broward only to be told by the warden that Inmate Wheeler is no longer there. She was transferred three days ago. Odd of John not to let me know. I take the phone number that Warden Stratton provides, and when I get back to my place, I call the Gotham Asylum for the Criminally Insane.

It's long distance, but the connection is worse than it should be. The place is supposedly in upstate New York. Listening to the static as the line rings, I'm picturing frayed wires strung between rotting poles.

A woman answers after the fourth ring, offers the asylum's name.

"Do you have a patient named Rosemary Wheeler?" I ask.

_Hold, please._

Two minutes of the last movement of Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony play through the dusting of static. Then a man's voice says: _This is Doctor Jonathan Crane. I am Miss Wheeler's treating psychologist. To whom am I speaking, please?_

"My name is Jackson Rippner. I'm a former colleague of Miss Wheeler."

_Former- I see._

Something odd about his cadence. His tone is brusque but slightly effeminate. "May I speak to her?" I ask.

_You understand: there's institutional policy, the matter of confidentiality. Her intake papers contained no contacts, no forwarding address-_

I ask, again: "Would it be possible to speak with her, Doctor Crane?"

_That- would be difficult, Mr. Ripper-_

"-Ripp_n_er-"

_-Miss Wheeler was killed yesterday trying to escape._

#####

#####

#####


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N:** Well, this is it. The end of the road for now. To the hardcore Batman fans who might be reading this, apologies: I've taken the liberty of placing Arkham a ways outside of town, and since I'm working more in the _Red Eye_ universe than in the Batman one, we're dealing not with Gotham but with a more real-world New York geography. (Actually, the setting I had in mind when writing the Arkham scenes was the old juvenile detention facility south of Red Wing, Minnesota; there you have it.) To my most loyal followers: blessings. (You know who you are.) And to all of you: thanks for putting up with my stuff and nonsense.

#####

#####

It's Tuesday morning, late and drizzling, when we pull onto the campus of the Gotham Asylum for the Criminally Insane. "Arkham," in local parlance, according to Information Services.

It's every bit the rotting heap I imagined. A pile of brick reinforced along the seams and corners with rough blocks of weather-blackened sandstone. Dozens of wings, the whole thing seven stories high. On average. I can gauge space for attics under the moss-flecked shingles of the roof. What windows there are are narrow and dark, and most of them are webbed over with metal mesh and bars. I wonder what the place might have been before. Or what its builders meant it to be. If not some kind of hospital, maybe an orphanage, or a small college. It's as if time has twisted the ideology of the place, warped it. Or like someone wrapped the whole building in chicken-wire netting and strangled it.

Doctor Crane said he would meet us at the front reception desk. Lisa is with me. Her suggestion, backed by Claire. Neither of them would suggest I'm grieving Rosemary, but her death has me rattled. Our oppositions define us. Remove the things against which we struggle, and we're apt to stumble. I'm off-balance, whether I want to admit it or not. John's angry, both at the fact that Rosemary was transferred without his knowledge and the fact that I seem not to believe him. "Seem." Since Lisa told me that Claire is really in charge of the company, I've been finding myself internally questioning his authority. Maybe it shows.

In a lot to the left of the asylum, we park our rental Beemer in the row of stalls signed "Visitor." We have the row to ourselves. Lisa and I get out, stretch our legs. It was nearly a forty-minute drive from Albany International. I look toward the row of cars one over. "Faculty Only." Two late-model pickups hunch in the rain, one Chevy, one Dodge. Four empty spaces over squats a rusting old black-beetle Saab. One space over from that is a semi-ancient XJ-12. Someone's legacy Jag, an inheritance car parked on blocks too long before being re-tuned and pressed back into service. A sag-springed old cat plated in frog-green metal skin.

I look casually for cameras on the lot's light poles, see none. I shut the driver's door of the Beemer and walk over to the Jaguar. I squat down by the driver's-side front wheel well and run my fingers over the top of the tire. The rubber is gritty and wet. The paving under the car is wet as well. I glance over: the ground under the Saab is dry. The drizzle started shortly after we left Albany.

I straighten as Lisa joins me. "Seems someone was running late today."

"Doctor Crane-?"

"I'm betting this is his, yeah." I look back toward the pickups. "From the way he sounded on the phone, he doesn't exactly come across as a Ram-Tough kind of guy."

The sidewalk leading to the main entrance is broad and badly cracked. I get the feeling that not many people come in this way. The grass on both sides is long enough to tangle. Old oaks spread black untrimmed branches too low to the ground. It's overcast; though it's nearly noon, tendrils of mist prowl between the trees, undissipated by the drizzle. The windows of the place follow us like blank black eyes as we walk up.

The doors are brass-framed, paned with dirty thick glass. I open the right-side one, hold it for Lisa. If anything, it's more overcast inside than out. The lobby is done in copper tones, verdigris, wormwood. Like the grand salon of a Thirties ocean liner sunken and raised but not restored. Two blocks of human gristle in dark blue uniforms man a huge desk parked at the center. They watch us suspiciously as we approach.

"Good morning," I say. "We have an appointment to see Doctor Crane-"

As I speak, I see motion at the gloomy far end of the hall. A man descends one of two staircases. Slight build, seemingly just under average height, dark hair, wearing eyeglasses and a black suit. The click of his soles on the black-and-brown tiles echoes as he approaches.

As he nears, Lisa suddenly breathes: "Oh, my God-"

I look at her. "What-?"

"You must be Mr. Rippner," the man says, reaching us. "I'm Doctor Jonathan Crane."

He has pale blue eyes, features I would think of as delicate for a man, full lips. The upper one has been cut recently. A punch from a small fist. A woman, likely. The blow left a sharp dark bruise at the point of impact; the skin inside his mouth was dragged over his teeth without breaking any of them. There's a bruise at his left temple, too. He offers me his right hand, and I shake it. He flinches at the contact, even though I'm not exerting any real force.

"Yes. It's kind of you to meet with us, Doctor Crane."

"Not at all." He looks at Lisa, smiling. "And you are-?"

"Lisa Reisert." She smiles back, politely, as she shakes the doctor's hand. Her customer-service face is so firmly in place that it's nearly a mask.

#####

Crane escorts us to his office. One floor up from the lobby, a right and a bit down a dingy hall. The place looks like an academics building about to be condemned for asbestos contamination. Knowing the state of New York's finances, it probably _has_ been condemned, and between the priorities of carcinogens endangering psychopaths and kids needing classrooms with four walls and a ceiling, the loonies lost out. Crane's office is that of an anal pack rat. Entirely too many books crammed onto heavy dark shelves, but the spines are lined up with the micrometer precision of Marines on dress parade.

"There's only the one chair, I'm afraid," Crane says. He offers it to Lisa, gesturing with a bony wrist-flick toward the kind of antique that conjures memories of sitting outside the principal's office. Or maybe, in another time, the sting of a ruler across one's palm. I guess the office chair behind his desk doesn't count when it comes to guests. He seats himself in it, leans back a bit. Lisa looks to me before she sits down.

"No problem. Have you had an accident recently, Doctor Crane-?" I tap my left temple while nodding toward his.

"Pardon-?" His fingers go to his forehead as if he expects to find blood. "Oh, no. No. An incident with a patient."

"That would probably account for the fat lip, then, too."

Crane's expression cools. There's a black Montblanc pen on the blotter of his desk. He reaches for it absently with his right hand, turns it between his fingers. "Working at Arkham has its risks, Mr. Rippner. I thought your interest in coming here was Rosemary Wheeler, not my personal welfare."

"You're right," I say, bluntly. "I want to see her body."

"Quite impossible-"

I take folded papers from the breast pocket of my suit jacket. "I have the necessary permissions right here."

"No- I see-" His smile is pasty, apologetic. "It's just that her body has already been cremated."

I stare at him. "On whose authority-?"

"Mine, and that of our chief physician, Doctor Breen. Per article eighty-one of New York's Mental Hygiene Law. Miss Wheeler's admission papers failed to name either next of kin or a power of attorney."

"And the state is aware that, within less than two days following admission, a patient died and was cremated at your facility?" Lisa asks.

"That's- if you'll pardon me- putting it somewhat crudely." His smile turns reptilian. "According to regulations, we notified the department of health. I can show you the documentation. We had no reason to retain the body. We had no instructions regarding the disposition of Miss Wheeler's remains. If we failed to honor her wishes per, say, organ donation, then I do apologize."

For just a second, I have in my head an image of parts-harvesters trying to find Rose's heart. "Autopsy photos," I say. "Doctor Breen must have photographed the wound or wounds, at least."

Doctor Crane stiffens. "Of course-"

"May we see them?"

"I must warn you: they're quite graphic."

"Doctor Crane-"

"Doctor Breen has them in his office." He stands, brusquely, and sets the Montblanc back on the blotter with an audible click. His left jacket sleeve brushes mine as he passes me en route to the door. "This way, please."

#####

Breen's office is on the first floor, at the forefront of the hospital's clinic. Walls in white, tiled to a height of four feet, worn gray linoleum underfoot. Thick mesh-reinforced glass facing out onto the clinic's entry passage and onto the interior of the clinic itself, so the good doctor can keep an eye on his patients and staff. Or so that they can keep an eye on him. His office looks like an aquarium built to house something cold-blooded, exotic, and potentially dangerous, and Doctor Breen would seem to meet at least two of those criteria.

He's at his desk when we arrive, seated behind the CRT monitor of a PC at least five years out of date; he rises when Crane raps at the open office door. He's round-headed, round-eyed, round-bodied. _Amphibious_ appears to be the catch-all term.

"Doctor Breen," says Crane, "Jackson Rippner and Lisa Reisert."

Breen's lips pull to the sides in a smile. "How do you do-?" His voice is soft, and he speaks with a lisp. He reaches to shake my hand. I half expect his skin to be as cool and smooth as Neoprene.

The photos are in a manila folder on his desk. The ISO is too high, and the pictures are slightly overlit, but the images are clear enough. Maybe too clear. According to Breen's notes, Rosemary took a .50-caliber slug to her left eye. The impact shattered the socket and temple and about a third of the left side of the back of her skull. It broke her nosebridge, shifted to the left her nose itself. Her open right eye is a hematoma mess. I identify her by the cleft in her chin. Then I have to glance away.

It's too much like Dad.

Shortly after I joined the company, I used my new-found powers of information retrieval to access the Illinois state forensics database. I saw Dad's autopsy photos. I'd told myself that what I was doing was right and sensible, that seeing what I hadn't seen through the closed lid of the casket would help me attain the number-one goal of the billion-dollar new-age grief industry: closure.

I had never been more wrong in my life. He'd left for work one bone-chillingly cold January night, while Milla and I were watching TV. I can remember hearing laughter from a studio audience, but I can't remember what we were watching. We never saw Dad alive again. He was shot dead with a sawed-off Remington 870 the following morning, during a holdup at Holiday Station Store 118, just outside Normal, Illinois. The autopsy team had to place a brace around his head before taking the facial shots, to keep his skull from disintegrating on the table.

I don't hear Crane's question; I only hear Lisa's response: "Yes, Doctor, thank you: we've seen enough."

"Let's return to my office, shall we?"

He's just a touch too satisfied. He's obviously a smug, supercilious son of a bitch, but for just a second I sense that he thinks he's not only put me in my place but that he's pulling something over on me, too.

"I'd like to request copies of those photos, Doctor Crane," I say.

He stiffens, slightly, across the shoulders. "I'm afraid that's not possible. I've already committed a breach of protocol by showing you-"

"Doctor Breen, have you forwarded those pictures to the state forensics database?"

A rapid blinking of the gecko eyes. "Of course. But-"

I take out my phone, pick Paul Miller's number from my contacts. He answers on the second ring.

_Yeah, Jackson-?_

"Rosemary's autopsy photos should be in the New York state database, Paul. Have them downloaded and analyzed, please. If they're not there, let me know."

_Just in time for lunch, too. Will do._

Breen is looking confused, but Crane is quietly seething. Now it's my turn to look smug. "Shall we return to your office, Doctor Crane?"

#####

#####

#####

At a quarter past one, I wake up at Mum's. She keeps a room for me.

I arrived just before five a.m, found the key mag-boxed to the back of the downspout, let myself in. In the kitchen, in the dim light from the fluorescent bulb bracketed to the wall above the sink, I ate a bowl of cream of tomato soup and a third of a stack of Carr's crackers. I came upstairs quietly, brushed my teeth and took a long, hot shower, and fell asleep, in my own pajamas, in my own bed.

An e-ticket to Florida awaits me in cyberspace. I ordered it this morning, via an all-night internet cafe above a kebab shop downtown. Later today, I'll be traveling to the Keys, by way of Miami International, for some well-earned rest and contemplation. If anyone is looking for me- Jackson, say, or his old basset-hound master John Carter- they're more apt to be checking the international flights. They won't be looking right below their noses.

After departing Arkham and driving homeward, to Albany, I abandoned Doctor Crane's loose-jointed Jaguar six blocks from the train station. I wiped down the interior, the door handles, the atmospheric knobs, and the steering wheel, and left the keys in the ignition. Just to make things confusing for the cops or the carjackers, I locked the doors. With the cell phone I found in the pocket of his suit coat, I called Crane's office number and left a polite message telling him where he might find his car, if I hadn't by chance misinterpreted the street's parking restrictions. Then I pocketed his tie, took off his suit jacket, walked two blocks over to Tenth, and caught a very early bus. The blessings of having multiple identities and a knack for memorizing credit-card numbers: dear Jonathan didn't pay for a thing, save for my bus fare and twenty minutes of internet time.

My flight is at five-twenty; I snuggle as long as I dare under the down comforter. Once I'm up, I dress in jeans, a simple blue t-shirt, a pair of Oakley trainers. From under a loose bit of carpet in my bedroom, I take a key; from under a loose floorboard in the closet- one of the oldest hiding places in the book, and, hence, now, in these modern times, one of the most overlooked- I take a plastic-bagged packet of credit cards, cash, false passports, and driver's licenses from a black steel security box. It's then, still kneeling on the bedroom floor, that I realize I'm better at memorizing numbers than remembering names: for five utterly blank seconds, I can't recall which identity I used when I ordered my plane ticket.

Mum was an actress, once upon a time. She's taken Dad for enough, in terms of alimony, to do what she really wanted to do- that is to say, write. To her credit, she's made a go of it. She's had pieces published in literary journals, the occasional arts quarterly. She's currently working on her second collection of short stories. When I come downstairs, I find her at her work table. It's more like the workspace of a graphics artist. Papers are splayed all about; a flatscreen iMac rises like a shrine in the eastern corner. Mum is standing, leaning over the table, writing by hand on a big legal pad, a heavy stoneware mug of tea near her right elbow. I pour half a mug for myself before I join her. She acquired a taste for Tetley's during her years in England, and while she's working, the electric kettle is perpetually on.

She asks, still writing, "Are you in trouble, Rose?"

While I'm reasonably certain that dear Jonathan will not report my escape to the authorities, I know for a fact that Mum doesn't watch the news. She's a great imbiber of information, but CNN and its ilk are nothing but ephemera to her. How she balances her poles without resorting to antidepressants. "No, Mum." I smile for her, reassuringly, when she puts down her pen and looks my way. "The Carters have recruited an especially incompetent new agent. Her name is Lisa Reisert. Jackson and I are lending a hand, trying to help break her in. We're leading her on a game of manhunt. So, should Jackson call or stop by..."

"... I haven't heard from you."

"Exactly."

She looks to the mantel clock. "Shouldn't you be getting a move on? You know it's at least twenty minutes to the airport, and the pre-flight screening has been taking forever."

"I'll ring for a cab." I drink my tea, drift back into the kitchen.

"Are you sure you don't want me to take you?"

"No, Mum, it's fine," I call, as I rinse my mug under the tap. "Really."

She appears a moment later in the kitchen doorway. She stands and watches me, leaning into the frame, her arms crossed against her chest. I see her trying not to look worried.

"Are you leaving the country, Rose? Am I allowed to ask?"

"Yes, of course you're allowed to ask." I join her; I hug her shoulders. "And, no, I'm not going abroad. Heading south. I need to work on my tan."

#####

#####

#####

Back in Crane's office, Lisa and I decline a terse offer of coffee or other refreshments. "Other." "Refreshments." The corner of Crane's mouth twitches between the words. Looking at him, I fight an urge to smirk. _Arsenic, Mr. Rippner? A touch of cyanide, perhaps, Miss Reisert?_

Lisa is regarding him with nearly naked contempt. "That patient who attacked you, Doctor Crane: was he or she also shot in the head with a large-caliber revolver-?"

"No. _He_ was, I assure you, properly and humanely restrained. We are not barbarians, Miss Reisert."

I ask: "How did Miss Wheeler attempt to escape, Doctor Crane?"

"She tried to impersonate a member of staff. One of the matrons in the women's ward. At bed check, she-"

"Are you gay, Doctor Crane?"

He stiffens, laughs incredulously. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Rippner-?"

"Jackson-" Lisa intones.

"I'm sorry." I smile. "It's just- you seem so _feminine_, Jonathan."

The stiffening becomes an outright bristling. "I think this interview is over, Mr. Rippner."

"Fine." I meet his pale eyes. "If it's all the same to you, though, I'll be back, Doctor Crane."

As he ushers us to the door of his office, I hear him mutter "No, you won't."

He reaches for the door handle, and I think I hear a quiet hissing. From the radiator, maybe. He opens the door, and for a second I smell something sweet. Too floral, too exotic, to be a cleaning chemical. Like orchids. Below the sweetness is a scent of decay. A whiff, and gone.

"A pleasure, Miss Reisert." Crane shakes Lisa's hand. He doesn't look at me directly. One of the guards from the desk downstairs is waiting in the hall. "Mr. Mowbry will escort you back to the lobby."

#####

Paranoia seems to follow us down the cracked sidewalk. Certainly not completely unfounded: Crane must be watching us from his office. I imagine he has the guards watching us, too. God only knows what other eyes are on me and Lisa. Madmen's eyes, fronting madmen's brains.

The drizzle is turning to rain. When we're halfway to the parking lot, I see a man standing about thirty yards off, to our left, between two of the black-trunked oaks. Average height, trim build. He's dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt; he isn't wearing a jacket. Not an inmate, not a guard. A groundskeeper, perhaps. Something seems to be wrong with his face-

I slow, look more intently his way. He steps out of sight, behind one of the trees.

I feel a tremor in the muscles of my jaw. I look away, still walking, look back. He doesn't reappear.

As we reach the visitors' parking row, I fish the car keys from my coat pocket. I look up to find Lisa looking at me oddly over the roof of the BMW. "Jackson, didn't you see it?"

"That he fucked her?" I have to concentrate to shift my thoughts from the man in the trees back to Doctor Crane. "Or- more likely- she fucked him?"

She laughs incredulously. "That was obvious."

A tone from her to which I'm not accustomed. Lisa gets in when the passenger door unlocks. I stand for a moment longer in the cool air, letting the rain pelt my face. I'm feeling- what? It's like a knotting in my throat and chest. Am I shocked by her sarcasm? What did she see? What did I miss-?

The feeling, after a moment's dispassionate assessment, is too much like fear. _For Christ's sake, Rippner._ I look back toward the trees. No one. I look at the building. Nothing but a moldering old pile of bricks with a nearsighted weakling hiding behind his dirty windows, his books, and his egoist's delusions of power.

I get in the car, buckle my seatbelt. "What was obvious, Lise?"

"He could be your twin, Jackson."

I miss the ignition slot with the key, nearly fumble it. "What-?"

"He looks exactly like you. No: like you would have looked if you grew up in a concentration camp. Or in a place like this."

I don't look at her. I focus on getting the key into the ignition, starting the car. Sweat is breaking out on my forehead, the back of my neck. But I feel cold. "You're imagining things."

"Suit yourself."

#####

I suggest a detour after we leave Arkham. Rosemary's mom doesn't live that far from the Albany airport. What I tell Lisa, and myself, is that it's a bitch hearing news like this from someone you don't know. Like that cold-eyed ghoul back in Arkham. What I'm really running on is a hunch. Maybe it's that I can't believe she's dead. Not from the perspective of grief, mind, but more from the fact that the Rosemary Wheeler I knew had the survival skills of a cockroach.

Lisa, understandably, is irritated. Or at least puzzled. "Why do you have to do it? The company could inform her family-"

"She doesn't work for the company any more."

She's not the only one who's on edge. I had word before we flew out this morning: our team in London has managed to lose Andrew Brinkman. He took a cab to his flat from Heathrow on Tuesday night. He didn't leave for work today. Nor did he call in sick. When our people broke in, they found the television on and the bed unmade. A tumbler of whiskey and melted ice standing in a ring of condensation on the dining room table. They're trying to track him now. They're trying to track his corpse, that is. Fuck. Fucking incompetents.

I rejoin our shared and thoughtful silence already in progress. I didn't mean to sound as hard as I did. Lisa looks out the rain-streaked windshield. "She didn't have many friends, did she?"

Rosemary was her own best friend, I think. She had friends, a whole group of them, living inside her head._ Madder Rose._ My back shudders against the car seat; the chill is spreading through my torso. "Not that I'm aware," I say.

"Jackson-"

"- yeah, Lise?"

"Do you want me to drive for a while?"

"No. Why?"

"You don't look very well."

"I'm fine-"

I'm shaking. I reach for the environmental controls, turn on the heat.

"You're absolutely white," she says.

"Lisa, I'm fine-" I hit the crown of the steering wheel. A solid, ugly _thunk_. Lisa jumps. "God damn it, don't patronize me!"

It's the first time I've sworn at her since- _Jesus_-

- since we met. Since I tried to kill her. Since I was a fucking monster. Since, setup or no setup, that's exactly what I was. Lisa shrinks in on herself. She looks away, out the passenger window.

There's a rest stop coming up. Traditional, right out of the Fifties. An empty one-row parking lot with room at the back for RVs. A patch of grass, a cinderblock building to house the toilets. At the edge of the grass, just short of ash and birch woods, a grill and a picnic table crouch like spiders under a peak-roofed gazebo. Rain-misted hills roll away, beyond. I angle into the lot, pull into a spot, put the BMW in park.

"Lisa, I'm sorry."

She's sitting with her elbow against the bottom of the window, her hand shielding her eyes. "Yeah-"

She's crying.

_Damn it._ I reach for her. As I do, I glance in the rearview mirror.

Dad is in the back seat. Half his face is missing. He's watching me with one blue eye, one bloody black socket-

It's as if my heart stops. "_Fuck_-"

I swing around, look. There's no one there. Of course there isn't.

As I turn back around, Lisa unbuckles her seatbelt and gets out.

"Lisa, wait. Wait-"

I get out, too. I round the back of the BMW. Lisa moves about six feet from the passenger door and stops, her back to me.

"You're right," I say. "There's something wrong with-"

I put my hand on her shoulder.

Her spine jerks. "Don't touch me-!"

She turns on me, and she slaps me, hard. I can do nothing but stare at her, stunned. She looks at me, at the car, at the parking lot, and she hits me again, this time with a closed fist-

"- you fucking monster, you monster, you fucking _monster_-"

I block, but I don't fight her. I look, and Dad is seated at the picnic table under the gazebo. Rosemary is across from him. My gorge rises. Their faces are sloughing off; red-white chunks of brain are oozing from their broken skulls onto the treated wood of the table top.

- and Lisa is chanting, not screaming, which somehow makes it that much worse: "-I'll kill you, I'll kill you, I'll fucking kill you-"

The ground feels as if it's tipping beneath my feet. I can't quite catch my breath. I'm fighting an urge to run, away from the rest stop, away from Rose and Dad, out onto the highway. I look away from the gazebo and ask, as calmly as I can: "Who?"

She swings again. I don't manage to block it, and her nails rake my left cheek. "Who, Lisa?"

Her eyes are moving from the car to the pavement at our feet and back again. Her voice drops to a dry hiss: "You _raped me_-"

She looks at my face, but she's not seeing me. Her eyes are glassy, and not just with tears. It's as if she's looking at someone behind me. No: as if she's looking _through_ me. She takes another shot at my head. I sidestep, and she misses. I turn my back on her, walk away, keep going. I step up the curb, cross the asphalt path bordering the sidewalk. The long wet grass beyond. I walk toward the trees. I don't know what's happening to us. All I know is I have to get her away from the parking lot.

She follows. I hear the soles of her boots on the pavement behind me. On the grass just beyond the gazebo, she grabs me by the arm, and I let her swing me around.

She stops short. Stares at me.

I keep my eyes on her. I don't look toward the picnic table. "It's me, Lise."

"Jackson-?"

I reach out, lay my right hand against the back of her neck, draw her close. I embrace her cautiously. She puts her arms around me, presses her face to my neck, and starts to sob.

I hold her in the rain. I feel weak, stripped. The water stings the scratches on my cheek.

"I think we've been drugged," I say at last. My voice seems to be coming from outside my throat, from ten feet away or more. I look past Lisa's head to the gazebo. No one is there. A pair of crows is raiding the caged garbage can next to the picnic table. One stands on top of the flat lid and tosses bits of French fries and ketchup-bloody bun from a McDonald's bag down to the other on the concrete slab.

#####

When we get back into the BMW, I take a tiny polycarbonate penknife from the crease of my wallet. "Lisa, do you have a plastic bag-?"

"Sure-"

She digs in her purse. Her hands are shaking. I cut the ball of my left thumb, squeeze blood onto the blade. Lisa passes me a clean sandwich-sized Ziploc, and I package the knife and hand it to her. "Put it in your purse. The TSA scanners won't spot it. We'll pass it off to the chemistry team when we get back to Florida."

#####

We're still shaken. We pull into a truck stop, clean up in the restrooms, regroup over coffee. Seated opposite one another in a booth, we're calmer, though I still feel like shit for yelling at her. I can tell she still feels like shit for hitting me.

"Tell me what we're both thinking," I say.

"That we should go back to Arkham and confront that little freak."

"Why don't we want to do that?"

"The main reason? Because he'd be waiting for us."

"We'd disappear. We'd walk in, he'd gas us, have us locked away in the dungeon, and no one would ever see us again."

"You don't think that's what happened to Rosemary, do you?"

"You don't either."

Lisa frowns. With her fingertips, she grips her cup by the brim, turns it slowly on the laminate table top. "Why did he try to poison us? As a warning-? Is he insane?"

"I'm guessing he was running on one third anger, one third ego, and one third pure crazy. He simply couldn't resist." I peel back the top of a plastic mini-cup of half and half, watch white swirl into black as I pour the contents into my coffee. "If my reaction to the hallucinogen had been stronger, we might have had an accident. We might be dead right now. Crane is probably hoping we are. Chances are, he normally uses some sort of filter to protect himself when he deploys the gas. Here he was acting on impulse. He didn't have his protective gear handy, he was guessing with the dosage, and he didn't want to poison himself in the process of poisoning us. He might have built up a tolerance for it, too. That, and he likely keeps an antidote handy, in case he gases himself by accident."

"I don't mean to harp on this," Lisa says, "but it was eerie how much he looked like you."

"Whoever had Rosemary transferred to Arkham: maybe they knew that. They were using it."

"They were using Crane, then, too." Lisa looks at me. "You want to see if she's been to her mom's, don't you?"

#####

Rosemary's mom lives in a turn-of-the-century two-story in a suburb of Albany. Gables, lace curtains at the windows, Adirondack chairs on the open front porch. We arrive at three o' clock. I ring the bell; seconds later there's shadowy movement beyond the pebbled glass panels of the front door.

Noellen McKay, the former Mrs. Wheeler, has blonde hair, a compact, square-shouldered build, her daughter's catlike blue eyes. She's unweathered; she doesn't try to hide her age with makeup, but she looks younger than her sixty-two years.

"Miss McKay-?" I say.

"Jackson? Jackson Rippner, isn't it-?"

The moment she speaks, I know that stopping here was, at best, pointless. The effects from Crane's gas are still lingering, like the tendrils of mist on the grounds of Arkham, at the edges of my consciousness. "Yes, ma'am-"

"You used to work with Rosemary, didn't you-?" She looks at Lisa. "I don't know you."

"I'm Lisa Reisert, Miss McKay. I'm- an acquaintance of your daughter."

Something darkens in her eyes, her face. There's a sudden troubling in her. "You have bad news, don't you-?"

I take a deep breath. I brought us here; now I have to continue, even if, proceeding on the already shaky presumption that Crane and Breen are lying, the official documentation has been faked, and Rosemary is alive, there's a very good chance I won't be able to differentiate clues from paranoia. "Rosemary is dead, Miss McKay."

She stares at me, stunned. Her breath catches; she takes a step backward. Lisa puts her hand over Noellen's on the edge of the door.

"May we come in, Miss McKay?" she asks.

Noellen nods. Her eyes are filling with tears. She steps aside for Lisa; I usher Noellen ahead of me, close the door behind us.

A broad table, covered with papers and notepads, a flatscreen iMac at the far back corner, dominates the front room. There's a worn green sofa pushed up against the wall to the right of the door. Noellen sinks onto it. "When?" she asks. "How?"

"Two days ago. Rosemary- had suffered a mental break. She had been admitted to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital; she attacked a member of staff and attempted to escape; she was shot."

"Shot-?" She's looking straight ahead, neither at me nor at Lisa. Her hands are twisting in her lap. "Why wasn't I informed sooner, Jackson? Why am I hearing this from you?"

"Rosemary neglected to name contacts or a next of kin on her admission papers."

A tear breaks free, drops down her right cheek. She catches it with the heel of her right hand, savagely, almost as if she might shove it back into the duct. "And you know this because the company knows everything. It knows _everything_, Jackson. Doesn't it-?"

I don't reply. Lisa digs a packet of Kleenex from her purse, sits down beside Noellen. She puts her arm gently around her shoulders. "Can I get you anything, Miss McKay-?"

"No. No. Just-" Noellen bites her lip, blinks hard at the tears in her eyes. "Would you just-"

- _sit with me_. I hear the words now. I hear my mom saying them to a police officer twenty years ago. I've made a hell of a mistake, coming here. I should have left it to human resources, to the grief-counseling team, or to John.

#####

Built into the wall to the right of the sofa and Noellen's work area is a fieldstone fireplace, unlit. On the mantel, a mahogany-cased clock ticks away the day. I pull away from the cluttered work table a round-backed wooden chair and sit down. Five minutes pass. Ten. I take out a business card, write John's contact number on the back, Crane's as well.

"I shouldn't keep you," Noellen says, when I reach over to offer her the card. "It was good of you to come."

Lisa glances at me. "I hate to trouble you, Miss McKay," she says, "but may I use the restroom?"

"Of course."

They both stand. Lisa moves toward the stairs leading to the second floor. Her eyes are already tracking upward. Mine are, too. She's playing the good field partner. She wants to see if there are clues to be found. Traces. A second unmade bed, maybe an inmate's pants and shirt stuffed carelessly into a hamper. But in my mind, I'm picturing what we must both be picturing: Rosemary at the top of the stairs, or in a room just off the top, listening and watching. Armed with a knife, or a gun, or both. My heart punches the inside of my chest. Crane and his fucking drugs-

_I can't let her go up there-_

I'm starting to rise when Noellen nudges Lisa's elbow and points down the hallway running parallel to the kitchen. "Through there, Miss Reisert."

I'm standing when Noellen turns back to me. I look at the tears in her eyes and tell myself it's not paranoia, it's good manners. Plain human decency to stand when she does. No more hated messenger in the world than the man who informs a parent of a child's death. She smiles slightly, with numb, automated politeness, and sits again. I stay on my feet. Amid the clutter on her work table is a gray stoneware mug. It jogs something in my brain. Something I saw a second ago, watching her direct Lisa back past the kitchen. I look in through the kitchen now. There's a second mug, identical to the first, on the counter less than four inches from the sink.

_She lives alone, _I think. _Why is she using two mugs?_

Because she can? Because the fucking things tend not to come in sets of one? Because she likes coffee _and_ tea?

(... _you bastard, Crane_ ...)

I live alone, and I'm a man, and even I don't use the same mug over and over and over.

(... _you utter bastard_ ...)

"We should be going," I say, when Lisa re-joins us. She catches my eye, shakes her head ever so slightly. _Nothing_, her expression tells me. _Just a bathroom_. "Miss McKay: again, my condolences."

"Thank you-"

Lisa gives her a look of honest compassion as Noellen sees us to the door. "Miss McKay, is there someone who can be with you-?"

"Yes, thank you. I have friends in the neighborhood."

"Goodbye." Lisa smiles sympathetically, squeezes her hand, steps past me onto the porch.

I touch Miss McKay's arm. "Take care, Noellen."

She looks lost. Honestly, truly lost. She meets my eyes and says: "Rosie was always fond of you, Jack."

#####

We're back in Miami by eight. We grab a quick dinner, and then Lisa is off to fill in on the late shift at the Lux. She's learning; she's acclimating to life on the go: she slept, fairly soundly, on the plane. I pass my bloody penknife off to our chemistry lab in the Miami office, and then I call our data team in Chicago. Paul Miller informs me that, as far as our people can tell, Rosemary's autopsy photos are the real deal.

This takes me by surprise. "How can that be, Paul?"

_I don't know- let's see- Oh, how about this? That creepy fucker Crane was telling the truth?_

I take a deep breath. "The analysts are certain to what percentage?"

_Ninety to ninety-eight percent. They're good, high-quality images. Pixels don't lie, Jackson._

"Only people lie," I murmur.

_What's that?_

"Nothing, Paul. Thanks."

I get off the phone. He had a second woman killed, I think. Crane. Or his pet toad Breen. Or maybe Case- whoever he is- had that woman killed in advance. That's not Rosemary in those photos. It can't be.

I'm short on sleep, and earlier in the day I was drugged. I'm being irrational. The images I saw in those autopsy photos dislodged some very black recollections, that's all. I grab a cup of coffee and hole up in the data center, looking for pings on a man called John Case, watching peripherally for hits on Rosemary's known aliases. The problem is, I know, that the aliases mean nothing: she might have a dozen or more unknown ones. All of which is ridiculous. If anything, I'm here to help with the investigation into the death of a former agent. Why can't I shake the feeling that she's far more alive than she deserves to be?

#####

Lisa will be off at five a.m. She'll have time for a nap, and then she'll be due back at the Lux at nine. On top of exhaustion- she tells me this later, the next day, phoning on her lunch break- her Taurus has called in sick. I hear from her right after I phone the chemistry lab. (_Nothing conclusive yet, _says Michelle, regarding the drugged blood smeared on my knife blade and the inside of that plastic baggie. _We'll keep you posted, Jackson._) Either the battery or the alternator has chosen to die: Lisa had to have it towed to the dealer. Before I can ask, she tells me David Huxley was nice enough not only to give her a lift home after their graveyard shift but a ride back to the hotel later. Their shifts meshed today. At four-thirty in the afternoon, she shows up at the condo behind the wheel of a navy-blue Focus from Enterprise.

I come out to meet her. "I could have picked you up," I say, as she steps out on the driveway.

"I didn't want to trouble you. Thought either you'd be busy with the investigation or that you might like to get some rest." She puts her right hand on my chest, leans up to kiss me. "Get all the mileage out of the warranty that you can, Dad likes to say. They allow me forty dollars a day for a rental."

I look at the insectoid Ford parked next to my silver Three-Series. "Do they know what's wrong with the Taurus?"

"They're still running diagnostics. It wasn't just the battery."

I snort. "Ford electrical systems."

"Kind of like Daedalus getting trapped in his own maze-?"

"Mm hm. Even their certified mechanics can't figure 'em out." I slip my arm around her waist as we walk up to the door of the condo. "What did you have in mind for tonight? You must be tired."

"Actually, I'm feeling a little wound up." She turns to me as we step inside and says, devilishly: "I thought we might smack each other around for a while."

#####

I learned my lesson the last time Lisa knocked me out, and invested in training pads and head gear. There's plenty of room for sparring in the workout area on the condo's ground floor. We change into jersey shorts and t-shirts and proceed to pound the hell out of each other.

John has said that a solid relationship depends on ten things. One through five, as I recall, are sex, sex, sex, sex, and sex. Six is conversation. Seven is shared interests. Eight is patience. Nine, I think, in case anyone missed one through five, is sex again. And ten is finding a safe outlet for aggression. Lisa once told me that she would never again be a victim; just that once, to my detriment, I didn't believe her. Whatever Crane used on us shook loose bad memories in her head as well as mine: she might have been trying to sound casual when she came in, but I can see the determination in her expression, in the darker gray of her eyes, in the set of her shoulders. She's always been a tough, instinctive fighter; now she's becoming a skillful one. We spar; we branch off into freeweights, pushups, squats, and stretching; we have a water break. We're back to kickboxing when the doorbell rings.

I grab my towel, mop sweat off my face, check the monitor next to the kitchen. John and Claire are there on-screen, looking into the camera outside the front entry.

She cocks an eyebrow at me when I open the door, at my sweaty hair and t-shirt, at the relatively fresh scratches on my cheek. "Not interrupting anything, are we?" she asks.

"No. Of course not. Come in." I look out before I usher them inside. There's a silver Audi parked behind Lisa's loaner Focus on the driveway. The Carters are dressed for the warm Florida weather. John's in khakis and a sky-blue polo. Claire is making one of her rare appearances in a sun dress, an airy, cream-colored fabric with a floral print in blues and lavender. Suddenly I'm reminded what an utter stunner she can be when she puts her mind to it. "What are you two doing here-?"

"Sunday, Jackson. Remember?" John gives me a good-natured frown. "You invited us to stop by and see the new place when we came down to Miami on business later in the week."

"That was- Wasn't that supposed to be Thursday?"

"Jackson," Lisa says, "it _is_ Thursday."

I look at her blankly.

"He forgot," Claire says. "Oh, dear."

I'm still looking at Lisa. "It's not Wednesday, is it-?"

She stops trying not to smirk. "Afraid not."

My cheeks go warm. I give up, offer all three of them a sheepish smile. "I'm sorry-"

Claire chuckles. "No harm done." She looks around, fixes her eyes on the kitchen, touches John's arm. "Looks like we're cooking, old man."

"Right."

With the efficiency of a forensics team, he and Claire sweep in and survey the contents of the kitchen cupboards, the drawers, the refrigerator.

John asks Lisa: "Any seafood allergies-?"

"No."

"Good."

I keep a small pad of paper and a ballpoint near the phone; at the serving bar, John writes out a list, tears it off, and hands it to Claire. "Grocery store two-point-two miles back."

"Got it. Keys-?"

He hands her the keys to the Audi. She kisses him on the lips. "I'll be right back."

"Right." When Claire is out the door, he turns to me and Lisa. "Well, don't just stand there rubbernecking, Rippner. Get cleaned up."

#####

I shower in the bathroom in the guest bedroom, leave the master bath to Lisa. Claire is back within a period of time that would seem to defy all the laws of physics. I pass by the kitchen, walking my workout clothes down to the laundry room; beyond the brown paper bags lined up like tree stumps on the kitchen table, John is standing behind her with his arms around her waist. He nuzzles her neck, murmurs something; she laughs softly, brushes her fingertips along his forearm. I'm gone, soundlessly, before they turn to start the unpacking.

#####

Post-shower, I find Lisa catching a nap on the bed in the master bedroom. Not rude on her part: sensible. Another aspect of adjusting to life on the go, or of balancing, for now, two high-pressure jobs: she's grabbing sleep when she can. She keeps clothes at the condo: she's dressed, comfortably, in a grey silk t-shirt and a loose-fitting, light olive skirt, and she's lying on her side, her face to the breeze blowing in from the open balcony door.

It's too tempting. I lie down behind her. John and Claire certainly won't mind; if anything, John will be happier if he has a clear run at the kitchen. No need for me to be underfoot. They can find what they need, and if they can't, they can come and ask. We're friends.

I spoon against Lisa, chest to back, slip my arm across her waist. She smells of jasmine soap. She sighs, shifts slightly, puts her hand over mine, against her belly. I close my eyes.

_Just for a minute,_ I think.

#####

Fingers are brushing through my hair. I open my eyes. Lisa is right where I left her, breathing softly and deeply, her hand still pressed over mine. I crane my neck, look over my shoulder.

Claire is lying behind me.

She grins. "You should see the look on your face," she whispers.

I look at the alarm clock on the nightstand, feel a pang of guilt. "Christ, Claire-" I've been out for nearly an hour. There's being an absent host, and there's being a downright lazy host, and I've blundered over the line. "-I'm sorry."

"Quite alright. We found the liquor cabinet." She kisses me on the right temple. "But if you think we're eating all that paella on our own, Mr. Rippner, you are sadly, sorely mistaken."

#####

Maybe I should feel like a dick for forgetting Claire and John were coming in the first place. Maybe I should feel like even more of a dick over the fact that, essentially, they've traveled nearly twelve hundred miles just to make me dinner. But, God, the man can cook. At least I've got decent wine on hand. That paella and that bighearted Ravenswood Zin greet each other like the best of friends. The four of us burrow into John's heap of rice and vegetables and seafood, and, relaxed among ourselves, we eat slowly and talk business.

First up is Rosemary.

"Either," says John, holding his glass and the rich plum-purple of his Zinfandel up to the light, "someone wanted her alive, or someone wanted her dead. One: she's dead."

"Because, believe it or not," adds Claire, "dear Rosemary had her share of enemies."

Lisa scoops more rice onto her plate. "Someone might have had her transferred intentionally and tempted her with an opportunity to escape. Or am I stretching here-?"

"Not at all." John sips, sets down his glass, again picks up his fork. "New York's social infrastructure is barely funded, and their bureaucracy is straight out of Kafka. Fairly easy to shove someone down through the cracks. Crane, though, does check out. If barely. Setting aside for the moment the fact that he might be dosing his visitors and-slant-or his patients with experimental drugs, he's running a very ugly service for very ugly customers. Few people are going to call him on his methods."

"Why, then, would we think she's dead?" I look at Lisa first, John and Claire after. "The report from Arkham says so, Crane says so, and the photos say so. Which leads us to two-"

"She's alive," Claire says. "Someone arranged for her escape, possibly paying the shady Doctor Crane and his staff at Arkham to lend a hand. In both scenarios, one and two, we have the mystery element: John Case."

Lisa asks: "Who is he, do you think-?"

"Former company?" muses Claire. "Former CIA-?"

"Also a 'company.'" John interjects. For Lisa's benefit, he adds, wryly: "They were here first. Which is why we got stuck with the lowercase 'c.'"

Claire gives him a trace of a smile, continues: "Mr. Case might also be former FBI. Or he could be part of a freelance group. We're checking to see who might be in the market for someone with Rosemary's unique traits: a psychopathic bitch who's a master of disguise."

"You know," Lisa says, "I would almost pay to see that on a resume."

John chuckles as he helps himself to more food. "For now, the official word is that she's dead. If nothing else, if she's alive, she might get careless if she thinks we're not looking."

The four of us go quiet; we keep eating. Silence falls on us comfortably, but next to me I can sense Lisa tensing. Finally, she says: "I don't know if I can do it." She looks at Claire. "The company. I don't know if I could take over."

We've reached the evening's unofficial, and far more personal, second point of business. "Which, in a nutshell," Claire says, gently, "is why we're offering it to you. We don't want someone who's power-mad. We don't want a politician. We don't want a Rosemary Wheeler."

"What we _do_ want, among other things," John says, "is to retire while we're still young enough to enjoy it, knowing that the company is in the hands of someone we can trust."

"You've got your business degree, Lisa, and your psychology," Claire continues. "You're smart and adaptable. More than that, you're compassionate. Brave. You think clearly, and act decisively, under pressure."

"And you wouldn't be alone." John nods to me. "Jackson can provide an agent's insight, intellect, aggression. I'd say you'd make a very promising pair when it comes to running things."

"It's not like we're planning on leaving the keys on the table with a Post-It note." Claire smiles. "You'd be looking at a training period of at least a year. We just wanted to know if you'd be interested."

I ask: "How do you feel about it, Lisa?"

She half-frowns, half-smiles. "Uncertain." Her voice is half-whisper. She reaches for her water glass, sips. "Flattered," she adds, more clearly. "Interested: yes."

John breathes out, settles back in his chair. "Do you have any questions?"

"Yes." Lisa looks from him to Claire. "Are you alright?"

"Excuse me-?" John asks.

Claire props her elbows on the table, looks at Lisa thoughtfully. "Do you mean, are we handing it off because one of us is sick? Mortally sick?"

"Yes."

"No. As far as we know- knock wood- we're perfectly fine."

Lisa looks as relieved as I feel. "Good. That's good."

"Anything else?" Claire asks.

"Yes." Lisa doesn't hesitate. She looks at both of them. "Jackson told me the Keefe job was pretty much a setup. Was Matthew Leon a setup, too?"

Claire raises her eyebrows. "I left 'frank' off that list of adjectives, didn't I?"

Lisa asks John: "Were you recruiting me then?"

"No." John looks at her openly. "Jackson once asked me, after the Keefe thing- he said he was interested in you. He asked how he might go about it. Meeting you socially. I suggested he try being nice. That's all. And if you didn't respond favorably, that he walk away and not look back." He pauses. "And- if you called the police- that he run like hell. I wasn't about to condone any off-the-clock stalker nonsense from one of our top people."

Lisa smiles. "One more question-?"

"By all means."

"What did you do before?"

"Before I joined the company-?"

"Mm hm."

John looks at Claire, and at me, a little sheepishly. "I was an accountant." He clears his throat, reaches for his water glass. "For some fairly shady characters. But, yeah: I was an accountant."

Claire turns to Lisa. "You thought he was a criminal mastermind, didn't you?"

"He does look the part, doesn't he-?"

"He certainly does."

John snorts. "Oh, come on-"

"I always thought you could be a Bond villain, John," I say. "The chiseled jaw, the burning dark eyes-"

"The high forehead," Lisa adds. "The demonic good looks."

Above the rim of his glass, John goes red. "Christ, are you two hitting on me-?" He glances at Lisa. "Anyway, she's a liar."

Lisa looks shocked. "What-?"

I look at John. Claire does, too. John sits with our eyes on him. He drinks, sets down his water, reaches casually for his wine glass. "She once told me she didn't love you, Jackson." He smiles, then, at me and at Lisa, and raises his glass to us. "I'm glad the truth won out."

"Thank you, John." I touch my glass to his.

"I'm happy to admit I was mistaken." Lisa smiles, joins us in the toast.

"Friends and lovers," Claire adds. "Health and long life."

Lisa looks at me. "Friends and lovers," she repeats, softly. I touch her cheek, lean in. We're only halfway through the kiss when the phone rings.

"Saved by the bell," Claire says, reaching for the wine bottle. I grin, pleasantly flustered, as I push back from the table.

#####

I check the I.D. before I pick up.

"Yeah, Paul-"

_Jackson, they found Andrew Brinkman._

I stop smiling.

I listen to what Paul has to say; I thank him for calling; I hang up. I return to the dining area and tell Lisa and Claire and John what Miller told me: this morning, Andrew Brinkman was found, at low tide, on the south bank of the Thames east of Tower Bridge, by mudlarkers-

"- Thames beachcombers," Claire murmurs, for Lisa's benefit.

He was kneeling. He'd been buried up to his neck in mud. Both of his knees were broken. And he had lead weights chained to his ankles.

#####

#####

#####

There's a resort in the Florida Keys called- ah, but then it would no longer be my secret getaway, would it? I rent a bungalow amid the whispering palms; at the on-site salon and spa, I have my hair tidied from "boyish, razor-cut, and on-the-run" to something more "Audrey Hepburn, circa 1966."

Now I'm on the beach, on a cushioned lounger, wearing a blue two-piece one click away from "obscene." In the warm sun, slightly drunk on good rum punch, I'm thinking _Maybe the world is big enough for all three of us. Me, Jackson, Lisa Reisert, too._

Beyond my eyelids, a shadow falls over me. Someone steps between me and the sun.

A male voice asks: "What do you call a hotel manager up to her neck in sand?"

Maybe I've dozed off. His is a baritone, nicely modulated. Cultured. I nearly smile. "Not enough sand, of course." My eyes stay closed. "You're blocking my light, darling."

"My name is David Huxley."

"I don't recall asking," I purr in reply.

"You might know me better as John Case."

The man who arranged my transfer to Arkham. I open my eyes, look up. And up, and up. He's maybe six-foot-three, black-haired, brown-eyed, classically handsome. He's wearing a short-sleeved shirt ablaze with orchids, unbuttoned over a pair of blue swim trunks. The muscles of his torso, legs, and arms are noticeable, and, if I'm any judge, not just for show.

He might take the following question any of a dozen ways. I find myself hoping he does. "What can I do for you, Mr. Case?"

"'Dave.' Please." He drops easily to his haunches beside my chair. "I hope you don't mind. I took the liberty of picking this up off the porch of your bungalow."

He offers me a white-and-blue FedEx envelope. Tyvek. Unrippable. Unbiteable. Simultaneously, we produce blades: I a S.O.G. spring-back from my beach bag, he a Kershaw lock-back from the pocket of his trunks. We share a smile, and I slit the top of the envelope.

Inside is a flat case about the size and thickness of a standard American paperback. Black plastic, hinged. I unclasp and open it. Bedded in soft blue sponge, I find a gray metal canister and a syringe. The syringe is filled with yellow liquid; it's labeled, in black-ballpoint scrawl on a piece of white surgical tape, "Antidote."

"There's this, too," says Huxley, reaching into the envelope. He passes me a folded piece of paper.

I unfold it. The same black highflown scrawl, familiar:

_I suggest you use this unwisely._

_All my love,_

_Jonathan_

I refold the paper. "I'll ask again: What can I do for you, Mr. Huxley?"

He repockets his Kershaw. "You work for me, Miss Wheeler."

"Doing what?"

"Finding enough sand."

"For whom?"

"For John and Claire Carter. For Jackson Rippner."

"And, if I may be so bold, for Lisa Reisert as well-?"

"Of course."

I refold and re-lock my S.O.G.; I place knife and note and black plastic case in my beach bag. Then I smile at John Case. "You may now ask me to dinner, Mr. Huxley."

There are sparks deep in his dark eyes. He smiles back at me. "Will you have dinner with me, Miss Wheeler?"

"I would be delighted."

He straightens his long legs, stands. He offers me his hand, and I graciously allow him to help me up from my chair. It's later than I thought. To our right, in the distance, the sun is turning red as it slips down to the horizon. Darkness is spreading out across the smooth cerulean ocean. As we walk up the beach toward the resort, the palms shake breeze and shadow from their fronds. I let Huxley carry my bag. Night falls; a new day begins.

#####

#####

**THE END**


End file.
